Theory of the Subject

elements of X are the only ones to satisfy, in M, this statement. Put differently, X is that subset of M such that an explicit statement, built according to the parameters that belong only to M, describes a prop­ erty common to all its elements and to these alone. Such a statement characterizes X. M, so to speak, controls linguistically its part X. It detains its formula. From there, you will pass from one set-theoretical stratum to another through an ordinal enumeration in a recurrent structure. 268

matic crowds that bless us with the gift of their personality during the 'meetings' of the major unions. Indeed, the algebraic encoding of the excess, which submits it to an ordered enumeration, reduces what is subjectively too-much to what for this order is too-little. Whatever a place holds virtually in terms of subjectivization, once it is realigned exclusively onto the empty point of its boundary, falls back on the equilibrium between place and excess, which does nothing more than repeat the fact that a place has the power of being the place of the subjec­ tive, without the qualitative break by which the subject-effect in a torsion escapes the local measure. A truly astonishing theorem ( Rowbottom) stages the force of interdic­ tion by which constructibility mutilates the mUltiple. In order to grasp its Significance, we must understand that Godel's outcome does not at all satisfy the regular mathematician. What the latter wants is for the doctrine of multiplicities to prescribe the continuum hypothesis as a necessary result, and not as an allowable supplement. 269

THEORY OF THE S U BJECT

His or her goal is not the hollow freedom to add or not the continuum hypothesis to the axioms of set theory. The underlying idea is that it is not possible to make an axiom of the identity between the excess and the occupation of the empty place. What is needed is for the real to impose on us the impossibility for it to be otherwise. If not, the integral dialectic prevails: there is some heterogeneity between

SUBJECTlVIZATION AND SUBJECTIVE PROCESS

This goes to show the extent to which to posit any set as construct­ ible, which is Godel's path to establish the consistency of the continuum hypothesis, means to castrate the immanent power of the mUltiple and to strike those multiplicities that are too ambitious with the stamp of interdiction.

the logic of succession among the empty places and the interior excess of the multiple. Similarly, the trade unionists who defend the idea of 'supporting' the

3

social force of immigrants, in order somehow to regularize the latter'S status within imperialist society, want history to impose their solution

In 1 96 3 , Cohen demonstrates that the negation of the continuum hypoth­ esis is as consistent with the axioms of set theory as its affirmation. The 'disorder on earth' installs itself by way of demonstration.

as the only political solution imaginable. For them what is at stake is the simple, metaphysical, and atemporal nature of class, whose status defines their ideology of belonging. One therefore searches for a way to curb the continuum hypothesis by reshuffling the axioms. For example, by formulating hypotheses regard­ ing the plausible existence of gigantic cardinalities. It is a question of somehow bringing the excess in line, no longer from below, through infe­ rior strata as in the constructible universe, but from above, by admitting straightaway certain pre-eminent mUltiplicities that are expected to order everything that precedes them. Along this path, comparable to the nationalist, war-mongering, imperi­ alist 'grand designs' by which the bourgeoisies seek to light the backfire of crises and popular upsurges, nothing worthwhile has been found. Rather, it became possible to measure in what sense the control 'from below', the Godelian constructibility, supported none of the vast existen­ tial hypotheses, due to the intrinsic poverty of its resources in terms of multiplicities. If there exist 'very large' cardinalities (the technical definition of which I cannot get into here), there necessarily exist innumerable sets that are not constructible. The pressure from above and that from below are incompatible. You cannot both and at the same time show off the syndicalist euphoria for negotiating the imperialist expansion in times of peace and indoctrinate the people in the risk of war and the shady appeal of conquests. Rowbottom demonstrates that if there exists a certain species of cardi­ nality-a 'very large' type of multiplicity-then there are, among the parts of the modest set of whole numbers (the smallest infinite set) many more that are nonconstructible than constructible. l o

270

Most amazingly, in order to build his model in which the algebraic regu­ lation of excess comes to falter, Cohen uses a technique to which he gives the name of 'forcing': blind intuition of the fact that, at the point where the rule of succession no longer applies, what is at issue is the subjectiv­ izing force. Cohen's model is built along paths that are diametrically opposed to those of Godel. We can hardly provide an idea of it, if for no other reason than that no intuition matches this model. This is a symptom of the fact that it bespeaks the excess. In order to explore its detours, the reader will refer to the chapter by J. P. B u rgess on forcing in Handbook of Mathematical Logic (404- 5 2 ) . I t i s by the 'imaginary' extension o f a stable primitive model (ground model) that we obtain the wherewithal to unlimit the partitive resources of the multiple. The function of the excess of this added 'imaginary' set as an inductor can be glanced from its name: generic set. And, certainly, any subject brings about the divided unity of the generic and the constructible. The generic supplement is only minimally described. This is key: the weakest possible mastery of the language of the whole over that which is expected to make it proliferate. As Cohen himself says: 'In the present case we are starting with a single symbol for the set a and wish, in some sense, to give the least possible information about it: 1 1 Godel, by contrast, requires at each stage the maximum descriptive capacity, since he retains only those parts of which an explicit formula provides a singular property. In order to keep the information as scarce as possible, Cohen replaces 271

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

the properties of implication (if p, then q) with the more evasive property of forcing: if there is such or such a condition, then the statement q is 'forced' to be the case. A condition is in fact only an element of the generic set. The informa­ tion that allows us to situate the extension as the theory's model can be summed up by saying that the belonging of an element to the added 'imaginary' set forces such or such a property of this extension. A typical example of this evasive logic. or of the systematic under­ information sought after by Cohen, can be found in the preferential treat­ ment given to the universal quantifier over the existential one. Why? Because if I have a statement of the type (3 x) (P ( x ) ) , its truth according to the model requires that I designate a precise element a of this

SUBJECTIVIZATION AND S U BJECTIVE PROCESS

point of an inexistent relative to the statement p that the forcing of non-q is determined. What is a 'stronger' condition? Even if Cohen defines it strictly in terms of a relation of order, we can interpret it as a condition that gives 'more information' than the initial one, or again, a condition that is more restric­ tive as to the characteristics of the generic model. We will thus hold that p forces the negation of q if there is no condi­ tion, known to contain more information than p, which forces q itself. The statement q finds itself, so to speak, freed with regard to the conditions that are stronger than p. Thus, the forcing of the negative-of non-q-as opposed to the incom­ patibility induced by its implication, is the result of the fact that nothing in

model such that P(a) is satisfied in it. This precision runs counter to the generic inspiration, which aims to distinguish as little as possible within

that which locates and encompasses the condition p forces the truth of q.

the resources of the excess. In this regard the generic essentially resembles the topological. which, as we established, disidentifies the element in favour of its neighbourhoods.

logic of forcing. The 'No ! ' of the revolt is not implied by the local condi­

It follows that 'when faced with 3 x B (x ) , we should choose to have it false, unless we have already a symbol x for which we have strong reason to insist that B (x ) be true' . 1 2 Sartre has many times over asserted that the relation of the intellectual to the revolution lies in his or her universalizing function. He is right about this. The excess, which is the topological law of subjectivization, induces a primacy of the universal over that which, from the existential. produced whatever was distinguishable in the old world. Political force, once it is let loose, no longer distinguishes as before. Therein lies its communitarian virtue-its generic virtue. Likewise, it no longer prescribes the same negative space. It transmutes the old law of oppositions (parliamentary ones, for example ) . It teaches us to say 'no' differently. At this point we still have to break with the deterministic effects of implication. That p implies non-q means purely and simply, in the classical logic of propositions, that p and q cannot be true at the same time. If p is true, then q must be false. The implication of a negation denotes the incompatibility of two statements. In this sense, the truth of p strictly determines that q not be true. By contrast, in the logic of forcing, that p forces non-q means that there exists no condition that is stronger than p and that forces q. It is from the 272

Conceived of as a break, subjectivization certainly operates within a tions. It is forced by the inexistence of an absolute constraint that would force submission to the immediate conditions in a transcendent way. B etween formal implication and forcing there lies all the ambivalence that the dialectic introduces in the old problem of determinism. The subject's surrection is the effect of force within the place. This does

not mean that the place implies it. The generic extension obtained by way of forcing, to which the added imaginary set subjects everything that can be stated about it. allows the production of an impressive quantity of new sets. In fact, we can produce as many sets as we like. The resources of the topological turn out to be unlimited. We thus demonstrate that the cardinality of the set of parts of a set is literally free-floating. It surpasses the cardinality of the initial set with an arbitrary quantity. It can be the successor (as G6del shows). the succes­ sor of the successor, or it can find itself further down still in the series of cardinalities, and finally (this is the theorem of Easton). more or less as far down as one wants. Thus, the inner resource of a set. taken in its parts, is not regulated by any numerical legitimacy. It can go past everything that one purports to assign to it as its boundary. The logic of the excess is real, insofar as it is impossible to limit it. This is the reason why a minor nation, provided it counts on its own forces, can vanquish a great power (Mao ) . Except that it still needs the political concentration of its social parts, that is, a party. 273

THEORY OF THE SU BJECT

Of such a party, the cardinality-the force: mathematicians have had the foresight to name 'power' the cardinality of a set-surpasses every­ thing that one thinks might be expected from it.

PART VI Top ics of Ethics

Notice that Cohen, breaking with the old ordinal chain of the math­ ematician's desire, ends up converting to the superpower of immanent excess: A point of view which the author feels may eventually come to be accepted is that CH [the continuum hypothesis] is obviously false. [ . . ] Now � I is the set of countable ordinals and this is merely a special and .

the simplest way of generating a higher cardinal. The set C [the con­ tinuum] is, in contrast. generated by a totally new and more powerful

principle, namely the Power Set Axiom. [ . . . ] This point of view regards C [the continuum] as an incredibly rich set given to us by one bold new axiom, which can never be approached by any piecemeal process of construction. 1 3 What Cohen here recognizes is that between the logic of places and that of excess, there is a dialectical break. Thus, the excess finds itself removed from any numeral allegiance. The subject. in its double register of algorithm and neighbourhood, effectuates an irreconcilable scission of its own process. We welcome those 'vicinities of the vague' in which the partitive multiplicity is dissolved, considering them to be the proof. administered by those who would desire the exact opposite, that there is a wager on the real. If, in this wager, the number inscribed on the dice is the result of a consecution, it cannot link up into a chain that which, in the thrower's gesture, produces the incalculability of its reach . 1 4

274

275

Where?

March 9 , 1979

Ten theses on the subject-Donation and limitation-Hysteria, riot­ Where is the proletariat?-Where is the unconscious?-Mathemes of Marxism-Toward the topics

If I concentrate the present stage of our trajectory in ten theses on my subject-the subject-I must enumerate them as follows: 1 . The subject-effect is the split articulation of a structural vacillation around an empty place and a forced excess over this place. 2. From a materialist point of view, the subject-effect offers up to knowl­ edge both the algebra of its placement and the topology of its forcing. It insists on being caused by that which disappears from its place and consists in the neighbourhoods of its cause. 3. I call subjectivization the interruption of the vacillation by the excess. It is a destruction. 4. I call subjective process the putting back into place of the excess into a splace centred on the excess itself. It is a recomposition. 5. The subject-effect is only the divisible unity of subjectivization and the subjective process. Each of these moments is abstract. It is not accept­ able to speak of the subject except in light of a process of destruction­ recomposition, which in turn is referred, in a second articulation, to the dialectic of lack and excess. 277

TOPICS OF ETHICS

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

6. From the crossing of the two divided articulations it follows that sub­ j ectivization is split into anxiety and courage. 7. From the same principle it follows that the subjective process owes its

self, 'nonpositional in itself'. That such a being is nothing indicates from whence an ontology is possible, namely, from the cogito alone, which

unity to the twoness of j ustice and the superego. 8. The subject-effect is integrally designated in the topology of the four

The unlimitation of Hegelian knowledge (absolute knowledge) must include a principle of totality, the 'circle of circles' of its exhaustion, by

concepts: anxiety, courage, justice, and superego. 9. The topology makes a knot out of two pairs: anxiety-superego des­ ignates the effect-\jI; courage-justice, the effect-a. It is inappropriate to speak of the subject except in light of a process whose division

which it limits the unlimited, conferring upon it that encyclopaedic form

produces the oneness of \jI and a.

1 0. A subject is nowhere given (to knowledge). It must be found.

gives us the nothing, that is, existence in its essence.

that one book can write in its entirety. Now, for us Cantorians, the notion that there is a whole of knowledge falls short of true unlimitation, which is the immanent movement of the excess over all conceivable totality. The double-existential and limiting-function thus marks the classical concept of the subject throughout. It is the ground on which such a subject can be the point of departure. I hold that in reality we can only arrive at the subject. This is what marks

2

the time of Marx and of Freud, namely, that the subject is not given but must be found. The importance of the configuration sketched out by Marxism in politics

I would like to draw attention to the tenth thesis, which concentrates the post-Cartesian nature of our endeavour. Throughout the great classical tradition of idealism, the subject designates that transparent point of being, in a position of immediate self-donation, through which all access to existence as such must pass. All evidence, even if turns out to be void, is determined based upon the subject. Here you will recognize the formal function of the cogito. In Kant's optic, in which the subject constitutes the condition of possibility of experience without itself being experienced, there remains the evidence of morality, where we find the significance of the subject's ontological transparency. The classical subject is thus an operator endowed with a double func­ tion. On one hand, it assignates an irreducible being of the existent; on the other, it limits that which, from the 'remainder' of being, is accessible to knowledge. It partitions that which is immediately given and that which is mediately refused to experience.

and by Freudianism in philosophy nevertheless consists in not giving up on the subjective element. Even though the subject is neither a transpar­ ency, nor a centre, nor finally a substance, and even though nothing attests to its necessity for the organization of experience, it nevertheless remains the case that it is the key concept from which it turns out that we can think the decision, ethics, and politics. For each stage of Marxism (there are three) and of Freudianism (there are two) , we have to solve the specific problem of the investigative opera­ tors that put into effect the discovery and grasping of the subject. When Marx takes it upon himself to listen to the revolutionary activity of his time, to the popular historical disorder, it is a matter of pinpointing in the latter, pursuant to harsh theoretical and practical work, the dialecti­ cal form of the political subject as such. The deduction of its general activity presupposes only the riots of the nineteenth century. From here, it will then be necessary to unfold the complete topology of an order (the capital­ ist order) , to develop the logic of its gaps, and to take the heterogeneous all the way to the end, in order to name 'proletariat' that subject which is

Brought to their peak, these two functions appear to be inverted. The being of the subjective existent proves to be a being of nonbeing. This is Sartre's thesis. The limit of knowledge proves to be an unlimitation. This is Hegel's thesis. This inversion, however, is not real. The nonbeing of Sartre's free consciousness is in reality the name of its transparency. We would still be saying too much if we posited that what gives itself in transparency

almost not to be found on the anarchic surface of the events. Freud listens to the hysterics' prose and body language, from which it emerges that in the end what is at issue is the subject of neurosis as such, and not who is subject to neurosis. 'Unconscious' is the name of such a subject, here too trapped in a topology, namely, that of psychic life.

is. Consciousness is transparency of its transparency, consciousness (of)

Even though psychoanalysis and Marxism have nothing to do with one

278

279

TOPICS OF ETHICS

THEORY OF THE SU BdECT

another-the totality they would form is inconsistent-it is beyond doubt that Freud's unconscious and Marx's proletariat have the same episte­ mological status with regard to the break they introduce in the dominant conception of the subject. 'Where' is the unconscious? 'Where' is the proletariat? These questions have no chance of being solved either by an empirical designation or by the transparency of a reflection. They require the dry and enlightened labour of analysis and of politics. Enlightened and also organized, into concepts as much as into institutions. The only surface effect that begins to put us on the tracks of the subject (one sees this clearly in political riots as much in the hysteric's theatre) is the existence, already under the presupposition of a clarified materialism,

for Borg's game. That the same man, Marx, can be the engineer of asphalt and the champion at the net heralds the times that are to come for the polyvalent worker. It is with great swiftness that you can find the decipherment of the political subject when Marx, Lenin or Mao, exposing themselves to the destructive real of the symptoms of history, follow a chain until they obtain the in-between of two links. By the first, read The Class Struggles in France; by the second, 'The Crisis Has Matured'; and by the third, Report on an Investigation of the

Peasant Movement in Hunan, or the strange directives during the Cultural Revolution. Typical example: 'According to my own observation I would say that, not in all factories, nor in an overwhelming majority of factories, but in quite a large majority of cases the leadership is not in the hands of

of one true statement whose disposition perturbs the algebra of truth.

true Marxists, nor yet in the hands of the masses of the workers', so that

The subject is neither cause nor ground. It holds out in what it polarizes, and supports the effect of preceding itself in the splace: always invisible in

still be carried out' ( April 1 969).2 Or again, enigmatic and essential, in

the excess of its visibility.

'it seems essential that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution should the year of his death ( 1 97 6 ) : 'You make the socialist revolution, and yet you do not know where the bourgeOisie is. It sits at the heart of the Communist Party.'3

3

A question of topology: Where is the bourgeoisie? But, more decisively: Where is the proletariat? Where is it, since in the place where it is alge­

We can never repeat enough that the texts of Marxism are first and fore­

braically prescribed (the party-State) , it is the (new) bourgeoisie that is making itself comfortable?

most those of militant politiCS. The sign of this essentiality is an urgent, phosphorescent writing, at the juncture of inscription and subjective haste. It is there, upon exiting the allegory of the prisoners, that one thinks on the go. I am of the same opinion as Julien Gracq (in parenthesis, together with Samuel Beckett, the extreme end-point of contemporary prose, if it is not the case that the former brings Chateaubriand to a close, and the latter, Pascal ) : I reread The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire with an admiration and even a joy without any admixtures. Nothing comes close to the high tone and the sharpness of the trait-that from beginning to end and almost effortlessly traverses these texts-to the ferocious and buoyant cheerfulness of Marx the journalist [ . . . ] this revolutionary jubilation that has exclusively befallen only the very greatest-a kind of state of grace, a gaya scienza of the apocalypse [ . . . ] . 1 And the rest? The elephant that i s capital? This i s the hard surface of concrete on which the real match is played. Do not mistake the asphalt 280

There is not a single major text of Marxism that does not find its main­ spring in the question: Where is the proletariat? It follows that politics is the unity of opposites of a topics (the current situation) and an ethics (our tasks ) . I n The Class Struggles in France, the movement t o discover the subject works wonders as it is caught between the ferociousness of the polemic and the urgency of the intervention. Read, for example: . . . while the struggle of the different socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another-the proletariat rallies more and more round revolutionary Socialism, round Communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of

Blanqui. This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence ofthe revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition ofclass distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of 281

TOPICS OF ETHICS

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionising of all the ideas that result from these social relations. (SW 1. 282) Here the positional extraction of the four fundamental concepts of Marxism is combined with the labour of their historical topology. The four concepts are: - the party ( rallying of the proletariat) as advent of the historical One­ One; - the class struggle (permanent declaration of the revolution) as place of the subjective; - the dictatorship of the proletariat as exercise focused on destruction; - communism, not as a closed utopia but as the threefold process of economical. social. and cultural destruction-recomposition. Naturally, if you consider that the (proletarian) subject is specified by its registering of communism under the law of its dictatorship and in the guise of the class struggle, you obtain this Z that we anticipated two years ago:

"" :8; "

declaring the permanence of revolution

As for the 'permanent declaration of the revolution', it is not difficult to see how, to the uprising (June 1 848: silent anxiety of the cornered workers), it adds the permanent courage of the revolution. The latter means subjectivization in the place of the class struggle. Whoever retains of it only courage forgets that it is situated at the same point as historical anxiety. At least. that is, if there is a revolution, which is what any popular festival-of the surging, elegant, spring-like kind-is not, far from it. Let us say that. in defiance of history, to declare the permanence of the revolution means to tear oneself away, at the heart of the real. from the mere provocation of its too-fullness. It is when the bewildering riot lifts the ban of the law that to trace the direction of a commitment in the midst of its obtuse violence makes for the courage of a completed subjectivization. It follows that the four apparent concepts (party, class struggle, dicta­ torship of the proletariat, communism) are organized into four different ones, plus one, the party, the subjective grouping, which is only the generic name for whatever the knot of the other four gives us to think:

dictatorship of the proletariat PARTY

,,-

around communism

the proletariat rallies

You have to admit that. put at the cross in this way, the sentence begins to 'fess up. We are in a position to make it say even more, if we understand that

munism are the same thing (the subject-process of class politics) grasped in the scission of its identity into the superego and justice. 282

..

subjective process

{

<

movement-riot (anxiety)

insurrection-w ar (cou rage) dictatorship of the proletariat (superego)

communism (justice)

You can also classify the four concepts in the following manner:

the dictatorship of class is the superego modality of the subjective process, whose face of justice is communism. The word 'transition' has only an indicative value. As Mao repeats, without communist processus, there is no communism. And where is this processus concentrated if not in the 'transition' supposed to lead to it, and whose dictatorial terror supports the obverse of the restorationist law? Dictatorship of the proletariat and com­

{

<

subjectivization (class struggle)

PARTY

processus t\J

processus

Cl

< <

movement-riot (anxiety)

di,�
communism (justice) 283

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

The passage from one of these diagrams to the other defines the whole question of the discovery of the subject. This requires the superposition of two grids-the first one attentive to the dialectic of subjectivization/subjective process, which somehow follows the law of emergence of the subject-effect; the second, to the qualitative asymmetry within the subject. which enlaces the pulsional

The s u bjective twist: 'If a n d ex

May 4, 1979

algebra of ",-vanishing eclipse of the Same-and the recomposing topol­ ogy of a-destruction-recomposition. In the actual investigation, all of this derives from a movement among topologies. We know that Freud accepts its rule. When he moves from the system unconscious-preconscious-conscious to the topography id-ego-superego, we ignore where to find the object that is identical to the two tables. This is because it is a matter of inducing, from one to the other, the correct position of the plus-one-the correct way of asking the question 'Where is the subject?' Likewise, for Marx, when we move from party-class struggle-dictatorship of the proletariat-communism to things such as mode of production­

On the subject as undecidable-HOlderlin, half-way and setting the second half on fire-Static of the topos-The body, the party­ Phenomenology of the four concepts

relations of production-ideologies. Where is the proletariat? The secret of the subject is not contained first in one topology and then in another. It lies in the movement by which one blurs the other-thus re-producing the fact that a subject is the disturbance of an algebra.

The subject-effect, in its formal principle, can in no way be reduced to a simple contradiction. Besides, this is the hidden reason behind the need for a topology in order to push for its theory. You must have at your disposal a network of concepts, of which 'subject' always designates the articulation, without being able to situate within this network the point subsumed under this term. Whether it is a matter of the subject in the field of politics or of the subject of psychoanalysis, for these two orders-are there any others?­ are those in which the question is the most developed, and despite the fact that apparently they put at our disposal two specified terms for the subjec­ tive-class in one case, the unconscious in the other-we always proceed in a way that is askew, by a theory of the splace ( capital. the symbolic) in which we investigate, in a retroactive interference, the symptoms ( revolt, neurosis) to which no justice can be done without situating the outplace. We must therefore redouble the logic of the place with a logic of its interruption, a dialectic of failure, by leaning on the two slopes of mate­ rialism and having the wherewithal to think the divided regime of the occupation of places.

284

285

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

This is the main reason why Lacan, in a first moment, had to pin down the subject under the triple instance of the symbolic (law of the place), the imaginary (self-identity of the place) and the real (dispersion) . Then, in a second moment, he had to saturate this order with a topological approxi­ mation, in certain regards without escape since the cutting (of the knot) failed really to dialecticize the lack (of the object) . Marxism approaches the subject-support o f all politics (the party) on the basis of its three major concepts (class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, communism) whose intricate articulation defines, in Marx's own opinion (see his famous letter to Weydemeyer of March 1 8 5 2 ) , the very originality of his contribution. As far as I am concerned, worried about ensuring the link of cause and consistency beyond the Lacanian setup, I posit that the subject-process is a contradiction of contradictions, the twisting of two processes of which one ('l') subordinates the excess to the placement, and the other (a) inverts this order. The impossibility to decide the dominant term, since the double domina­ tion imbricates two processes, is key to the theory of the subject. The classical political debate comes down to asking the question: is it the line that is fundamental or the organization? This debate is in essence infinite, placing the 'correct line' in the mirror of the idea that 'the party is always right'. The core of the Maoist conception of politics posits that the construction of the party requires the mass line in matters of organization, that is: beyond the mass line of the party, it posits the mass line over the party. In doing so, it declares explicitly that the old debate is undecidable. In this regard, it puts into work the theory of the subject. Without giving in anything at all to indeterminacy, we posit that the subject-process is resolved in the undecidable. The undecidable is the concept of its constitution. We know since Godel's famous theorem that to posit 'There is some undecidable' can be the result of a demonstration. This goes to show that there is a concept of the undecidable, and thus that we firmly tie the doctrine of the subject to the possibility of a calculation. We demonstrate the subject. The undecidable does not mean freedom. It is the immanent point of flight of any order whose necessity we determine at the crossover between two processes, 'l' and a. If liberty is foundational. the undecidable by contrast is inferred. It is equally forbidden to think that between the two processes 'l'

286

TOPICS OF ETHICS

and a there exists an objective hierarchy. Neither excess nor lack has any intrinsic privilege, any more than subjectivization or the subjective process. I have polemicized against the reduction of the real to the sole figure of the causal object because it seemed to me that this Mallarmean acquisition, and the magnificent construction he drains around the van­ ishing term, took too much precedence over the dialectic of consistency. From this we should not draw the conclusion that the theory of the subject is thus re-centred (on the excess) . There is no centre in the subjec­ tive twist. Without the anchorage of lack, the excess would be nothing but a leftist chimera, quickly reversed into its opposite: a philosophy of nature, as we see in the case of Deleuze. Ethics, I will argue, is certainly not indifferent to the contrarian struc­ ture of the twist. It distinguishes between the strands. But it authorizes to decide only the following: there is some undecidable. Ethics amounts to the maxim: 'Decide consequently form the point of the undecidable.' We would be talking without saying anything, if the undecidable did not figure in a topology.

2 Holderlin is the second great figure of the German dialectician. There where Hegel makes a circle, he produces a torsion. Hegel deduces Prussia as a conceptual term from the State. It could be Napoleon, and Hegel toys with its equine idea (the man with the two­ horned hat was passing underneath his windows) . For Holderlin, Germany stands opposed t o Greece. Its all-Kantian modernity consists in making something informal out of the formal. whereas the original Dionysians turned their 'Asiatic' fury into the unsur­ passed form of the Temple. Germany is a nostalgia divisible into Greece and itself. rather than a single concept. Holderlin knows the topology of the subject: The boldest moment in a day's course or in a work of art is when the spirit of time and nature, when the heavenly which takes hold of man and the object in which he is interested, oppose one another most fero­ ciously, because the sensuous object extends only half of the way while the spirit awakens most powerfully where the second half flares up. At 287

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

this moment, man has to sustain himself the most; hence, he also is the most exposed in his character. ( ELT 1 1 0 ) This admirable text is the metaphorical condensation o f the four concepts. Holderlin is commenting upon a question that Creon asks of Antigone: whence derives her energy, her audacity, to sustain herself in the divi­ sion of the law? How can she bear the assumption of justice at the precise point where, in the guise of Creon-I mean in the guise of that which, in Antigone, is the obligatory existence of the Creon-effect-the violence of the superego demands repetition? In order to elucidate this problem, Holderlin goes straight to the dia­ lectical essence of subj ectivization. The whole text bears its unbearable torsion. What is the contradiction given in the risk, in the 'boldest moment'? On one hand, the 'spirit of time', that which 'takes hold of man'; on the other, 'the object in which he is interested'. It is patent that here lies the ontological discord between the consist­ ency that 'takes hold' and the cause (the object) . HOIderlin posits on

TOPICS OF ETHICS

one to 'sustain oneself. To sustain oneself, therefore, in the opening of the new, the apparent unlimitation whose dialectical identity is the limitation, the character. This is because courage, the burnt precipitation (one has 'fired one's last rounds' ) in the excess over the place, promptly recomposes-beyond the destruction that it is-the subjective process of justice. The strand a; of the subjective torsion explains why to be 'the most exposed' and to 'sustain' oneself are one and the same thing. And it is also one and the same thing to follow 'the object in which one is interested'-which it appears should fulfil the desire-and the fact that this object is always half-way. For this second identity is the strand '1', whose interlacing with the other explains why, from the point of the subject, you have the risk and the day, the ferocious and the exposed, the half-way and the character, that is, anxiety, the superego, courage, and justice. There is no 'virtue' in this. These words from Holderlin do not designate any ability and, in a certain sense, Creon will obtain no answer to his ques­ tion. It is a question of a passing moment, of a pass, in which half-way and fire forever poeticize the subject-effect.

one hand the excess, and, on the other, the place. That which 'takes holds'-and whose site, because it is out of place, is called 'heavenly'-is the same thing from which follows the need to tear oneself away from the place prescribed by the lack, in the guise of the object of one's inter­ est. It is not a source, a focus, or a cause. It is the very process of force as dis-placing. HOIderlin says so himself later on: the spirit of time 'awakens most powe rfully'. The placed definition of the human being, tied to the sensuous causal object, goes only 'half of the way'. What a remarkable expression! The

algebra is only half-of-the-way of the subject. The overcoming of this half­ way draws a topological picture that does not come up by accident. If the contradiction appears 'most ferociously', it is because the place must be overcome so that 'the other half flares up'. Astonishing metaphorical con­ cision! The 'other half is the other dimension, the topological correlate of any placement. The algebra is literally set on fire by the excess. What appears next? One must 'sustain oneself, wherein you will imme­ diately read the constituent requisite of courage, against the background of a 'ferocious' anxiety. Courage is the name of the topological burning up of places and of interests, inasmuch as it is subordinated to the gesture of opening oneself up to becoming 'the most exposed', which is what allows 288

3 The topic is in turn divided into a static and a dynamic. The basic square only tends to combine the two divisions of the subject­ process: - according to the pair subjectivization/subjective process, which refers us on, by way of the cause and consistency, to the logic of destruction and of recomposition; - according to the pair 'I'/a;, which refers to the alternating primacy of lack and excess. The four concepts become the peaks of a network of which 'subject' names the double articulation, or to be more precise, the double trajectory. If you think of subjectivization/subjective process, which is the ana­ lytical view of the subject, you obtain the two pairs anxiety/courage and superego/justice. If you think of 'I'/a;, which is the synthetic understanding, you obtain the two pairs anxiety/superego and courage/justice. 289

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

TOPICS OF ETHICS

To know the subject requires the unfolding of two trajectories. Any analysis of neurosis or of a mass revolt, operated from the point of theory­ practice, clearly shows this. In all cases, the support of the crossing is a nameable term of materiality. This term is the One of the double processus.

{

riot-movement

CLASS

of the animal body nor in that of the institutional body. But for there to be a subject, for a subject to be found, there must be the support of a body. The static of the subject-the result of a chain of concepts as complex

party - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ogy) , and so forth-gives us the following:

{

I

anxiety

subjectivization

SUBJECT subjective process

-----

----

I

I

courage

I

superego ---- justice

lj;

et

�-----v--body

SUBJECT

insurrection -war

____

communism

CLASS

The unschematizable aspect of the subject consists in making a point out of a line.

as are all those of the structural dialectic (splace, outplace, vanishing term, causality of lack, lack of lack . . . ) and all those of the logic of excess (forcing, destruction, division of the law . . . ); and the reprise of the whole set through the fundamental categories of materialism (algebra and topol­

l I

dj'""o"hip o, ' h' pwl""[,,

For psychoanalysis, it is the sexuated body. For Marxism, it is the party. Conceived of in the spirit of Marx, as the 'rallying' of the proletariat. It is the party in its physics. The party is the body of politics, in the strict sense. The fact that there is a body by no means guarantees that there is a subject, neither in the case

-------

4 I said that the four concepts are neither virtues nor abilities. Better yet: they are not even experiences. Two years ago, I proposed their abstract formulas. There you can see clearly that they are only names for certain processes, and nothing else. Neither anxiety nor the superego nor courage nor justice are states of consciousness. They are categories of the subject-effect. What these cat­ egories give us to think is a specific material zone, which is the opening principle for any destruction of that which supports it. 1 . Anxiety is that form of the interruption that, invaded by the real as too­ muchness, lets this order be as dead order. Here the too-much-of-the-real interrupts the vacillation around the empty place by way of an obstruc­ tion, whereas courage, for its part, operates by way of deregulation.

The elementary Marxist translation of this formal arrangement is con­

We might say that anxiety designates the moment when the real kills the symbolical, rather than splitting it.

structible. This requires a whole repertoire of mediating concepts (history and politics; revolution, programme, division of the bourgeoisies, the people, alliances, modes of production, dominance, State, masses, and so

Hence, subjectivization blocks the rule without annulling its space. This paralysed space turns the disorder into the death of order, under the concept of this order itself.

on) . See the diagram below. In these schemas, the obligatory usage of lines should not hide the fact that anxiety and courage operate from the same point, as do j ustice and the superego. This point is that of the destruction and the recomposition. Here the static inverts itself into the dynamic. '

obsession which haunts the politicians. Of course, that which governs the position of this void-as if suddenly the unoccupyable place were every­ where-is the intolerance toward disorder, because the latter is retained, under the formal maintenance of the law, in the ( dead) figure of order.

290

Historically, anxiety exists as the nomination of the 'power void', that

291

TOPICS OF ETHICS

THEORY OF THE SU BJECT

When toward the end of May '68, the newspaper Le Monde made a complete turnaround that threw it back to the side of the counterrevo­

- the universality of the excess, which makes everyone, in his or her place, suspicious.

lution ('Enough ! ' Beuve-Mery put in the headline) , it argued from the point of chaos and transmitted anxiety as the violent appeal to the Gaullist superego. Anxiety effectuates the destruction of meaning as chaos in such a way that the law, always undivided, shines in the distance insofar as it no longer rules. Anxiety maintains the excess within topological adherence. Of this paraJysed order, the law commands that I carry the whole corpse. The interruption is stuck onto the splace with the emblems of a funeral. At the origin of anxiety there lies the production, by way of the excess, of a ques­ tion without an answer (courage, for its part, is an answer without a ques­ tion ) : 'What does one want from me?' But, though fatally hit, the place in which this question is sounded remains the old order of the place. Anxiety, as we see in the mute and suicidal riots (June 1 848, for example) , implies in its effect the death of destruction itself, the destruc­ tion of destruction. It is the most reflexive of the subject's concepts. It involves that form of the excess by which the place implodes. 2 . Hence anxiety calls upon the superego. Anxiety is that inevitable side of subjectivization which, caught in the web of the dead order, makes an appeal to the reinforced sustenance of the law. Here the Freudians will mention the anxious practice of self-punishment. The excess is that which anxiety is in the intolerance of its being. It is the excess hindered by its very own principle: topological adherence. The sacrifice of the excess to the restoration of the place is what subordinates subjectivization to the conservative subjective process: the superego. This correlation defines the strand \jf of the subjective torsion. What is the process of the superego type? As a figure of consistency, it puts the excess back into place by distributing it everywhere according to the

available places. The superego is the structural aspect of the excess. Through it the algebraicization of the topological occurs, as it full of subjectivizing anxiety, the place recomposed itself on its own in the terrorizing prescrip­ tion of the placement. In fact, the superego is the subjective process of terror. Hegel's descrip­ tion, referring implicitly to the terror under Robespierre, may here suffice. This description brings together: - the 'destruction of the actual organization'; - the indifferent order of death; 292

Here we see how in the superego effect, the ferocious figure of the law, its essence of nonlaw, is set free and becomes omnipresent: Now that [universality] has completed the destruction of the actual organization of the world, and exists now just for itself, this is its sole object, an object that no longer has any content, possession, existence, or outer extension, but is merely this knowledge itself as an absolutely pure and free individual self. [ . . . ] The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the cold est and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. In this flat, commonplace monosyllable is contained the wisdom of the government, the abstract intelligence of the universal will, in the fulfilling of itself. [ . . . ] When the universal will maintains that what the government has actually done is a crime committed against it, the government, for its part, has nothing specific and outwardly apparent by which the gUilt of the will opposed to it could be demonstrated; for what stands opposed to it as the actual universal will is only an unreal pure will, intention. Being suspeded, therefore, takes the place, or has the Significance and effect, of being gUilty; and the external reaction against this reality that lies in the simple inwardness of intention, consists in the cold, matter-of-fact annihilation of this existent self, from which nothing else can be taken away but its mere being. (Ph 3 5 9-60) The placed ferociousness exterminates the intentions without regard for the facts. It suffices to be in order to be judged superfluous. Hence it is futile to study terror based on the divisible objectivity of acts. To the con­ trary, we must start from anxiety'S incapacity to effectuate the division. From Hegel's impeccable text (which, moreover, refuses to judge: terror is an obligatory moment in the becoming of self-consciousness), let us retain that terror is a phenomenon that belongs to the subject, and not to the State. The 'government' is only the mode of being of the universal (that is, for us, of the universality of the excess distributed throughout the entire dead empire of places) . This means that terror is a modality of 293

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THEORY OF THE SUBd ECT

politics, and not the mechanical result of the modern State. If you seek to understand and forbid the Gulag, take as your target Stalin's politics in its rational subjective determination. The opposite idea, which seeks to determine Stalin's politics, or even Marxist politics in general. on the basis of the Gulag, leads only to vulgar moralism. Now the fundamental inconvenience of vulgar moralism lies in its impotence. Whoever seeks to put an end to terror and to the Gulag must follow the Marxist road of the political subject, of which terror is a dia­ lectical condition, a properly restorationist figure. Moral protest in reality prepares the way for the repetition of terror. The essence of terror is political. We must understand the terrorist State on the basis of the subjective consistency of a mode of politics, referred

longer is in its place', becomes the new law, which makes life out of death itself. Anxiety is de-sense, based upon the subsisting splace for a blocked law.4 Courage is in-de-sense, based upon the excess under a split law.5 Do you want a simple rule for when anxiety is eating away at you? Look for the courageous act before which you show reluctance, the real that you believe to be impossible, and which is real for this very reason. Look for your current indecency. Its precision will surprise you, and anxiety is here that which guides you toward the truth. All this is superbly put in Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage. A true manual of anonymous subjectivization in which the unity

back to its root: the subjectivization, the Soviet anxiety, the anxiety of civil

of opposites between anxiety and courage literally produces the subject, in

war and of the NEP. We must think the State on the basis of terror, and

the double sense of the book's hero and its subject matter:

not terror on the basis of the State. The denunciation of the repressive and bloody character of a mode of politics does not amount to the real criticism of this politics, nor does it ever enable one to be done with it. We Marxists are the only consistent and effective anti-Stalinists, because we are the only ones who fully grasp-in order to recast-Stalin's politics. We dread the vulgar 'anti-Stalinists' not because they scream against the camps and against torture-they are right to do so-but because, through the inoperative themes of the state's objectivity or of 'totalitarian ideol­ ogy', they organize the present weakness in the face of the subjective logic of terror. Yes, we dread their political weakness, their involuntary acquiescence, even when inverted into restorationist anxiety, to the cor­

relation 'If, without designating the latter in its subjective inherence, its profound political force. 3. Courage is situated at the same point as anxiety. It is that which tilts over into the excess. But it finds support in the division of the law, in a wager on the real. in such a way that it effectuates the disorder as the order of meaning. The empire of courage is the life of excess. Its reactive correlate is the dead order of which anxiety takes charge. Courage effectuates the interruption of the dead law in favour of the excess, thus dividing the prescription of the place by completely investing its neighbourhoods. All courage amounts to passing through there where previously it was not visible that anyone could find a passage. To go past the threat of death, which only ever means 'that which no 294

He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them. With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that. after all, it was but the great death. He was a man. [ . . . ] Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover'S thirst to images of tran­ quil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks-an existence of soft and eternal peace. Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds. 6 Impossible to give a better expression to the way in which, coupled onto anxiety, courage-a practical breach in whatever is unapparent-opens out to the serene dissipation of the law into justice. Courage names the absent cause, obstructed by the real, by enabling a division of the place. This division puts the law to the test, instead of calling for its restoration.

295

THEORY OF THE SUBd ECT

4. Justice, the consistency for the haste of the cause, amounts to relativ­ izing the law, whereas the superego makes it absolute. This time the effect of recomposition obeys the maxim: 'Always more of the real, and less of the law.' If, in the superego, the nonlaw is only the universal barbarism of the law, then in justice it is the corrosion of the law itself. It is the subjec­ tive principle of the withering away of right.

Diagonals of the i ma g i n a ry

May 11, 1979

The active source of j ustice, inversely to that of the superego, is the topologization of algebra. Here the neighbourhood subordinates the ele­ mentary to itself. Justice is the blurring ofthe places, the opposite, therefore, of the right place. Justice is retroactive-correlation a-by way of the approximative legiti­ mization of courage, whereas the superego-correlation Ijf-designates the rigours of anxiety. The division of the subjective process happens according to the distribu­ tion of the excess, either on the side of order within each place or on the side of its withering away as an ongoing process. The undecidable lies in the fact that this 'either . . . or . . .' forms an interlacing, and not an alternation or a simple coexistence.

Horizontals, verticals: diagonals?-The imaginary as saturation of the static of the subject-Examples of diagonalS-Dogmatism and scepticism-Meagreness of the imaginary-Recollection, recollection! What do you want from me?

The superego is the restorationist face of recomposition (which does not mean repetitive: Stalin is not the Tsar, nor is Robespierre Louis XI) . Justice is its instituting face. But every institution restores. Admit that here you have a pleasing phenomenological digression. Combine it, I beg you, with the cold mathemes that give you its theory. Though always blind, a decision always allows one after the fact or apres

coup to state the essence of its undecidability.

Let us spend some more time going over the static of the subject. We have established the horizontal correlations: anxiety-courage is the subjectivizing scission; and superego-justice, the contradiction of the sub­ jective process. We have also established the vertical correlations: anxiety-superego defines the strand-Ijf of the torsion; courage-justice, its strand-a. We have posited the blocking-interruption of these two links: the body, general hypokeimenon of the subject-effect and bearer of the undecidable. Are there diagonal correlations? What is the meaning of the pairs courage-superego and anxiety-justice? A static comprised of all the systems of linkage will be called saturated. Is this the case of the schema of the subject? I immediately answer: Yes. What saturates the static of the subject is nothing

but the imaginary. The diagonals give shape to the two great imaginary functions-which also constitute the formal concepts of ideology: the dogmatic and the sceptic. 296

297

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THEORY OF THE SUBJ ECT

The idea that the diagonal saturation is the very definition of the imagi­

the superego) or to justice (by way of anxiety) through a fixed principle

nary is fully in keeping with Lacan's teaching, j ust as it is part of the legiti­

of identity-whether it is a question of God's law, the cult of Mao, or utopian mania.

mate line of descent from the Marxist theory of ideology. When Thomas Miintzer fires up the German countryside with a com­ munist egalitarian discourse, he courageously subjectivizes, against the backdrop of death, and appeals to j ustice. When he names his courage based on the absolute conviction that Christ seeks the fulfilment of this design, he proposes the imaginary articulation of the bravery of revolt based on the superego whose allegory is 'the Kingdom of God'. When the Red Guards in Beijing attack the new bureaucratic bour­ geoisie in order to put into effect a communist programme, they are constituted by the strand-a, except that by invoking the guarantee of the 'absolute authority of Mao Zedong thought'. they become ideologically

sutured to '1'.

When the institution of mass democracy, as the immediate actuality of political communism, is accompanied by terrorist prosopopeias against the 'spies' and 'traitors', this is because the law's precariousness, such as the process of the justice-type institutes it, immediately entails the expo­ sure of anxiety, the remedy for which is an imaginary inflation of risk, as the fixation of a real whose blurred places provoke the experience of too-plenty. When the utopian communists, ideal figures of the nonlaw, are accom­ panied, as we see in the case of Fourier, by an infinite detail of prescrip­ tions and duties, setting up a combinatory of rules for the totality of the passions and in fact leaving no room or leisure for any neighbourhood, this is because it is convenient to stop the breach, supposed to be general­ ized, of the rule via the strict deduction of all of the real. The imaginary is thus what provides the connection between the strands a and '1', naming as it does, in the register of the ideal, the endless practical

The diagonals produce the function of the 'ego'; they produce the similar, the fertile fiction of a union of 'I' and a, by which the subject shrinks from the division that brings it into being. Lacan rightly congratulates himself for 'the wedge that I drive in here by putting back in its place the deceptive truism that identicalness to oneself, which is presumed to exist in the ego's usual sense [of itself] , has some­ thing to do with a supposed instance of reality [reel] ' (E 69/54). This 'wedge' is nothing else than the static distinction between the hori­ zontal (conceptual) connection and the vertical (real) connection, on one hand, and the diagonal (imaginary) connection, on the other. The imaginary, induced by the switching of the dominant between lack and excess in the subjective twist, fallaciously represents the undecidable as always already having been decided. Either (dogmatism) because there is an unbreached legal control over courage, or (scepticism) because the nonlaw of justice represents only the eternal undecidability of the law. The imaginary comprises two maxims: 'Guaranteed by the other, I can and I must everything' and 'Since there is no other, I can and I must nothing: In every case, this means the reign of morality, which is the exact oppo­ site of ethics. Alas, we are all extremely moral. Nobody can escape saturation.

2 Courage in the register of the imaginary supports itself with a fixed point

inversion of their respective dominance. The imaginary is what produces

by which the recomposition (into justice) j umps ahead to its opposite in

similitude and semblance between the lack and the excess. By way of the imaginary, courage evokes the superego while at the same time convoking j ustice. The imaginary wards off anxiety from the point from which j ustice can be inferred and courage is induced. Because it enables the diagonal suturing of the two strands of the subject, the imaginary reckons with the inexistent that is the identicalness

the superego. The assembly of the insurrection realizes an evasive scission of the law, but immediately there are only traitors to be executed.

to oneself. Go back to my examples, and in each case you will see that the stronghold of the imaginary lies in giving comfort to courage (by way of 298

Sartre has seen this very well in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, when on the basis of the group in fusion ( a notion which moreover would rather have to be registered on the side of the anxious subjectivization in '1') he generates the pledged group, where fraternity-terror reigns supreme.? His drawback lies in having presented as two successive figures of the same phenomenon what in fact is the coexistence of its vertical and diagonal 299

THEORY OF THE S U BJECT

TOPICS OF ETHICS

linkages and thus in having missed the point where the imaginary is dis­

political subjectivity. We need all the rigour of Lacan in order never to

joined from the real. This is because Sartre holds on to a simple conception

argue on the basis of a case of healing

of the subject. He enumerates its strands, without being able to think their interlacing. Actually, the phenomenal role of terror at work in mass democracy is what allows the imaginary absoluteness of conviction to algebraicize courage, whose essence is topological. Even though you dramatically changed according to objective but unknown neighbourhoods and fol­ lowed the immanent resources of excess, you posit, in China, that every­ thing results from 'chairman Mao's latest directive', to which obedience is immediately due; or, you, in Iran, that God proceeds by way of your modest intervention to expel Satan the Shah. This inevitable diagonal dogmatizes courage. The correlate of anxiety thereby finds itself mediated by the showy display of a superegoic antici­ pation, which in any case is what it always calls upon. Anxiety requires the excess in the same place of terror, and this requirement is the point of the real in the correlation IjI . Courage argues from an ideal dogmaticity,

the imaginary diagonal which, at the same point, guarantees that courage exposes itself to the real without destroying the destruction. Symmetrically, the process of j ustice, which means the weakening of the law to the benefit of the real, generates an essential uncertainty with

3 Arrived at this point, I confess to having little or no desire to continue. In spite of its legend, there is nothing more structural and, in the last instance, nothing more impoverished than the imaginary. It is true, there is also nothing more obviously necessary. I understand the temptation to exhaust the complete trajectory of its archetypes, which are those of good and bad fortune, adorned with the metaphors of nature. On the one hand, the register of its immanent splendour, which serves to confirm that there is (but there isn't) some Almighty. On the other, that of its anarchic indifference, in order to establish that we are put on earth without a home and without a hearth (but there is always a Place, and, H6lderlin says, a Fire) . Pascal has exhausted this question, with its misery and its grandeur. Good dialectician that he is, he looks for the divisible point from where this alternating representation disappears in favour of the pure real of the subject ( Christian is the name of such a subject ) . This point turns out to

regard to the subjective placement. Precarious fidelity to courageous subjectivization, justice is properly that which provokes anxiety as to the rule's strength to ward off the real. Justice by no means is the procedure

inexist in God (for to be content, like Descartes, with God's existence is only idolatry) and to exceed itself in the Text (for it is only through a topological

of serenity. Rather, it induces Ecclesiastes' notion that 'all the rivers run into the sea',B the chaotic imaginary of de-sense.

that overflow it, that one can discover that these Scriptures are an excep­ tion to the world) .

Justice is escorted by a vacillation of certainties, in which the blurring of the places is buttressed in the imaginary by its own eternity. 'There has never been any rule': such is the antagonizing diagonal fiction by which justice wards off the restorationist drives that are polarized by anxiety. Everyone agrees to overcode j ustice with ideals, to subject the future nonlaw to some rule, to name indefinitely, from times immemorial, what will be the case when all the known places of nomination will have been ruined one after another. This is because everyone essentially doubts the real autonomy of j ustice. Everyone combines the dogmatic diagonal of the fixed point, guarantee to come from the future, with the sceptical diagonal of disorder, guarantee handed down from the past. We need all the consistent bravery of a Marx and a Mao in order to refuse to legislate communism otherwise than from the real point of 300

reading of the Testaments, dissolving the letter of the text into the figures

The Holy Bible i s the excessive trace for the God who i s lacking. It is particularly easy to establish, for Pascal's Christian, the knot of anxiety ( think of The Mystery of Jesus: 'He suffers this affliction and this abandonment in the horror of the night'9), of the superego ( God unques­ tionably is terror), of justice (the duty of Love dissolves into grace all the worldly rules of the place) and of courage (we must wager, against mere diversion) . Misery and grandeur are the diagonals in which Pascal recognizes pre­ cisely the sceptical imaginary and the stoic inflation. Hence, it is fitting to converse with Monsieur de Saci about Epictetus and Montaigne. To dissi­ pate the imaginary one-sidedness of morality is the negative introduction to the dialectic of the subject. The Marxist theory of ideology suffers from the unstoppable meagreness 301

THEORY OF THE SU BJECT

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of the diagonals. What more is there to add, except the evident viscosity

consider them less the victims of a devastating illusion, as they pretend

of their entwining, to the separate formulations of the 'human condition',

today, than carried away beyond themselves by history, from whence

dogmatically exalted in its power as absolute (art and religion) or scepti­ cally reduced to its deficiency and to the inexorability of death? To show

they drew certain images, unifying consequences and not only the illusory

that all this sticks to our skin in the form of a transcendent denial of the

the real and not in order to install the semblant.l o Is this to say that we should sing the praise of the poetry of the imagi­

class struggle goes no further than the certified report of some materialist bailiff. The world 'turned upside down' only feeds into my passion for setting it straight. At the same time, I confess that the pressure of the imaginary, once we recognize its principle, by no means demands that we become scandalized. Even the famous 'cult of personality', in its manifest correlation to the oblique anxieties of just bravery, seems to me to stem from the inevitable presumption of the One much more so than from the dictatorial infamies which pass for real and which if needed are compatible with the most mediocre of images. Nobody has ever needed the cult of Guy Mollet's per­ sonality in order to give their massive consent, during the Algerian war, to the massacre of a million Algerians, including torture and the camps. As opposed to the Stalinist endeavour, from which at least a gigantic Russia emerged, these horrors are all the more transparent insofar as they only served to delay the inevitable independence by six or seven years and, thus, people were massacred, rigorously speaking, for nothing. I certainly participated in the 'cult of Mao', by means of which I. like millions more, figured the fixed point with which to gauge the radical turnabout of courage and the complete transformation of both my practi­

cause of their determination. The imaginary thus comes in to consolidate

nary? Of course not. It is easy to see that I honour it, as the senseless diagonal of de-sense or as the dereliction of ab-sense in the place of in-de­ sense, only on the grounds of what supports it in the subject as effective process. Even poetry, contrary to whatever academic explanations trail behind it, feeds on the topological dimension of language, and not on the imagi­ nary. This is one of Mallarme's directives: We dwell in those true groves, where, having marked our way, With large and humble gesture the pure poet must Stand guard against the dream as enemy to his trust. I I Let us not stand guard or prohibit but sum up:

anxiety

SCe.

trajectory by which this cult traced an imaginary diagonal and which, exposed to the real. I can now designate with clarity. But I confess that I feel no remorse whatsoever for having traversed this experience, not

courage

�

� I �!1\�tiS� I Glo�

superego

cal existence and my convictions during the second half of the 1 960s and the early 70s-years of grandeur if ever there were any. In retrospect, I have come to know its ridiculous aspects, the unrealities of the subjective

subjectivization 'of ",

CL

•

subjective process

j ustice

Now that it is saturated, the subject's static awaits only its momentum. This is God's famous finger flick to put the mechanism in motion. God, that's me. As modern as anyone can ever be, I will content myself with the word of an engineer.

even for nourishing an uncontrollable nostalgia when I remember those years. After all, so-called leftist intellectuals were otherwise vigorous and innovative under Stalin than they are today in the provincial debasement of their petty sentiments and their banal habits. I buy neither the posthu­ mous revenge of Camus over Sartre nor the excessive praise for Raymond Aron, because he would have been 'less mistaken', which is easy enough to accomplish when one does not take any risks other than to follow the pedagogy of the world as it is. As for the leftists of the post-'68 era, I 302

303

TOPICS OF ETHICS

How should we figure the unoccupyable place? We will show it in an oblique way by a hole.

Schema

We thus take as our point of departure a plane shot through with a hole, whereby at once we miss out on the essential fact that the hole is a place, an empty place, and thus a point like the others, disappeared among the others, if it is not lacking-in-its-place.

M a y 18, 1979

But how should we represent the fact that the subject. in a position of internal exclusion, vacillates 'around' the empty place that it un-occupies? This will only give us a vulgar approximation. In order to indicate that the occupation of the empty place is a structural movement, namely, the vacillating or the eclipsing, we need to have a way to schematize that 'something' of the splace occupies and does not occupy, fills and does not

Unfeasible-The formal subjective-Punctuality-Axis of abolition­ Trajectories-Action, reaction, stabilization-The escargot

fill. the hole in the plane. I decide on the solution of a vector, without origin, oriented toward the empty place. This polarization of the vector, taken at its extreme limit, makes the occupation (it is the hole that controls the orientation) and the inoccupation (the vector does not fill the void) into one. Our second task consists in entering the topology by schematizing the excess, by visualizing the outplace. Here we need something that neither

Any attempt to figure the subject as undecidable must face the impos­ sibility of its schema. The task before us is therefore impossible. The drawing that I am about to sketch out must be interpreted in light of its projections and its limit points. It structures a few symptoms for the unschematizable. Neither the qualitative break, whose operation is entirely practical. nor the contradiction, whose terms do not share a unified plane, can be put into an image. There exists no geometry of the dialectic. Lacan finishes his discourse as the draftsman of an impossible schema. He shows, without speaking, the point where the real cannot make a point.

purely belongs to the splace nor simply occupies the void but that brings out the vicinity between the two and thus fastens itself onto the subject's structural aspect. I secure this with an angular representation that. by introducing not only the plane but also the space, symbolizes whatever the excess holds in terms of a destructive tearing-away from the unity of the plane while at the same time, standing as it does directly above the vector, it remains structured by the oscillation whose vacillating flatness it interrupts. This framing device deserves the name of formal subjective:

2 hole

First, then, the splace, as the place of the subject's becoming out-of-place. The limit of the distribution of places is fixed therein by the empty place, the unoccupyable place, which is the structural anchorage of the outplace. 304

splace

305

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

TOPICS O F ETHICS

The formal subjective combines into a unique process both the vector's polarized movement toward the void and the angular representation that subtracts it from the splace. A subjective position is a point S I which in equal measure is caught in the ' vectorialization (placed, consequently, at the same time as it is excluded, due to the fact that it is with regard to the empty place that it moves) and supports a differential gap in angle, in spatial vicinity to S I (and thus, standing in the excess of interruption over the oscillation that carries it

the first vectorialization, symbolizes at the level of formal framing that the subject is a process of destruction-recomposition. In order to place the superego and justice, we give ourselves a vertical axis as a reference point to mark the limit of all conceivable destruction. This axis, aptly named axis of abolition, includes the infinite pushing back of the empty place. It is the axis according to which there would be no more law and only the real would exist; the axis of superhuman courage, of intolerable anxiety, of integral justice, and of the dead superego:

toward the inoccupation of the hole) . This point S I is subjectivizing in nature, being the minimal unity o f the

J

oscillation and the interruption, of algebraic belonging and the gap of topological adherence. The fact of its structural attraction is designated as anxiety, A, whereby that which in the excess risks depriving it of its lack explains why it appeals

Se

}

action

reaction

stabilization

Pr( p )

to the splace. The fact that in effect it is both excessive repulsion and priva­ tion of the polarity of lack is inscribed as courage, C . S I considered i n the double constraint o f the vector and the angle, at ' one and the same point is split into A and C. one somehow 'toward the bottom', and the other 'toward the top'.

3 How should we figure the subjective process? The idea is simply to produce the trajectory of an integral. for example, by pushing from S I all the way up to the angular line that is supposed to mark the boundary of the formal subjective (in terms of the excess) . Let us call this point S' I ' The subjective process would be the journey from S I to S ' I '

The gross simplification of this necessary hypothesis consists in the fact that neither the destruction nor, above all, the recomposition appears clearly.

splace

The conceptual mapping of the subjective process, beginning from the empty place, will proceed by way of projecting a subjective position onto the axis of abolition. The point of projection somehow gives us a measure relative to the trajectory. Here, again, it is doubly defined: by the splaced origin of the projection, which is its superegoic dimension; and by the axis of abolition itself, which supports its dimension of justice.

How should we make up for this dialectical shortcoming? Recomposition means a new splace. To make an image out of the fact that the re composition proceeds from the subjective process, we will position an axis of re composition, complete with its own empty place directly above the previous one, as the trajectory's formal future and, thus, based on the cycle's completion. The axis of the first angle, held to mark the maximum excess, will then be presented as the axis of destruc­ tion. The duality of these axes, unified by their common anchorage in

306

4 What is a subject-process? Let us follow its sections. The destructive impulse given in the differential A/C carries the excess of S I all the way to S' I and actually beyond, in the fragment of the curve ' that we will call the excess over the excess, between S ' I and S" I ' The latter in

307

THEORY OF THE SUBd ECT

some way is the inevitable leftist instance of any subjective interlacing, the moment when destruction raises the bid and goes beyond its own structural form, beyond its angular assignation to the splace, as if caught in

Ethics as the dissipation of the pa radoxes of

a vertigo of abolition-whose anxious thematic demands that one throw oneself head first into the world's inferno.

partisa n s h i p

At the point p, which is the extreme limit of what courage is able to bear

of the exposure to the real, and the maximum height for the projection J/ Se, there begins a 'descent' that can be mapped in S" J ' based on the fact

May 25, 1979

that anxiety here gains precedence over courage, attraction over repul­ sion. This is what we can call the moment of regressive subjectivization.

In strict correlation, the projections provide us with a measure of the fact that the superegoic instance gains precedence over the 'rise' of justice to right the wrongs. In S finally, there is a stopping point on a re composing vectorialization, 2' determined by lack. If from S J we trace that which connects it to p, the point of maximal

excess, and to S

the stopping point in which the real dissolves itself in the 2' immanence of parts, then we can carve out three zones in the right angle

Antigone once more-Ethics is the remainder of politics-Logic of the incalculable decision-To give in or to be-The Moscow trials-The partisan mindset

of abolition and conservation. On the left, the zone of action, governed by the primacy of courage and the growing vectorialization of the projection J/Se. In the middle, correlated to the regressive subjectivization, there is

reaction, in which A gains the upper hand over C, and where the point J/ Se declines once again. On the right, stabilization. You will understand that these are three simultaneous moments given in any subject-process. Space, in its superiority over time, is telling with regard to this coexistence. We could obviously continue:

From Hegel to Lacan, the reference point for ethics is Sophoclean. Who is Antigone? That is the question. You can imagine that I am not going to tell you that for us Marxists, Antigone is the expression of archaic social relations. Against the right of the city whose despotism is secular, these forces call upon the old unwritten right of blood and family. Now that would do you a lot of good! You would obtain the kind of Marxists truths-because it is true-thanks to which we have fallen behind the historical intel­ ligence of the bourgeoisie, without moving an inch toward an energetic break. Another way to formulate this same point is the following: there exists no Marxist ethics. At best there is an ethics of Marxism, which we can

There you have, ready for disassembly, the complete escargot of periodization.

308

designate retroactively as the practical principle behind the rational cal­ culations of politics. Ethics falls on the side of that which, in the primacy of practice, func­ tions as a remainder for the impossible exhaustion of theory. Take the advances and shortcomings of the protagonists of the Commune or of the Red Guards: once they have passed through theoretical reflection in 309

TOPICS OF ETHICS

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

view of the next stage, what remains is the fact that they incarnate the unconditional virtue of any historical account. that is, the unforgettable decision. We can find support for this in two axioms from Hegel:

- ' f . . . ] the ethical order essentially consists in this immediate firmness of decision' (Ph 280) - 'Consequently, the absolute right of the ethical consciousness is that the deed, the shape in which it actualizes itself, shall be nothing else but what it knows' (Ph 2 8 1 ) Ethics concerns the decision in its practical absoluteness, which cannot be inferred from anything else but from its contemporaneity to the knowl­ edge available at the time. Ethics makes a discourse out of that which can neither wait nor be postponed. It makes do with what is given. Here, we re-encounter the subjective function of haste as formatted in Hegel's text. Ethics essentially touches upon the undecidability of the subj ect. This is true even when, as all forms of wisdom aim to do, it argues from the point of view that this undecidability comes down to a pure acceptance of fact. The notion that ethics (Sittlichkeit) is the logic of the incalculable deci­ sion explains why for Hegel it is inferior to morality (MoraIWit), whose realm belongs to reflection. In this regard, we will reverse Hegel. Morality is indeed calculable, since it is caught in that which, from the splace, governs the dIsappear­ ing of the subjective process, its reduction to the state of a trace. Without arguing for a superiority, our interest will be in ethics. For we know the cost of what brings Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Rimbaud, though they are profoundly apolitical. to be on the side of the Commune, or what brings this or that reactionary peasant from Bourgogne to set up an underground resistance movement, purely on the grounds that, as he says, 'we must do something'. Without such decisions, there would not even be any matter for politiCS. Those who in these circumstances wait for the 'absolute reflection' have all the time in the world, be they Flaubert or Gide, to give a serene evalu­ ation of the wrongs committed by both parties and to tell themselves that Mister Thiers or Petain, though in disputable ways, objectively protect certain needs, whereas the others, dreamers no doubt. really exaggerate when they execute a nice bishop or when they shamelessly slaughter 310

an officer of the occupying forces protected by ancient conventions and recent capitulations. Ethics is on the agenda whenever the subjective tension obtains univer­ sality only in the particular forsaking of any will slowly to investigate the complete state of affairs. Lacan is certainly right in reducing ethics to the question: 'Has the subject given in?' Why the verb 'to give in'? Because what is at stake in a decision is not the quality of the subject but purely and simply its being. To give in means to disappear. Nothing will then have taken place but the place. The whole question of contemporary politics comes down to this: is the international proletariat of France going to exist? A rational politics has no other goal but to use the existing subjectivizations in order to sustain in a topology the communist process of this existence-the consistency of that which ex-sists. If we make ethics into the remainder of politics, we can also formulate the problem as follows: is it necessary to continue giving in to the undeni­ able advantages of the unionist-parliamentary splacing? The existence of the subject gets dissipated into the nonsense of the law as soon as the maxim is to give in. Lacan says this forcefully: 'Desire, what is called desire, suffices to make life meaningless if it turns someone into a coward' (E 782/660 ) . By inversion, this amounts t o defining courage as the core of the question. One always gives in for the sake of some good, one's own or that of others. Lacan calls this 'the service of goods'. Notice that to give in for the sake of others is not worth much more than to give in for one's own sake . The opposite of the ethical decision is not the selfish decision, far from it.

.

The proper opposite of ethics is betrayal. the essence of which consists in betraying oneself, in inexisting in the service of goods. I propose four theorems: 1 . One gives up on subjectivization in the name of the old subjective process. 2. The ground for the conceptual framework of ethics is the subjective interlacing of \jI and a. 3. It is necessary to give in, for any subject includes the process-\jI. Ethics is possible, for any subject includes the process-a. 4. The fundamental concept of the ethics of Marxism is confidence. 311

TOPICS OF ETHICS

THEORY OF THE S U BJECT

2 If the political subject is what the party as body is able to bear in terms of the undecidable, and if betrayal is the proper opposite of ethics, can we not equate ethics and partisanship? The recognizable figure of the one who gives in would then be the renegade. This is something that, since Judas, is an old temptation of any apparatus in which political subjects find their

hypokeimenon. In this logic, in which the State latently defines the adequate form of that which no longer exists as party-subject except as its semblance, it is absolutely necessary that the political enemy, or even just the universal suspect, be violently kept in the unnameable and null place of the traitor and the spy. We can find testimony of the fact that this place is unnameable in the incredible mix of metaphors by which the 'socialist' prosecutor Vyshinsky wants to pass it off as a pure nothingness: Our whole country, from young to old, is awaiting and demanding one thing: the traitors and spies who were selling our country to the enemy must be shot like dirty dogs! Our people are demanding one thing: crush the accursed reptile! Time will pass. The graves of the hateful traitors will grow over with weeds and thistle, they will be covered with the eternal contempt of honest Soviet citizens, of the entire Soviet people. But over us, over our happy country, our sun will shine with its luminous rays as bright and as joyous as before. Over the road cleared of the last scum and filth of the past, we, our people, with our beloved leader and teacher, the great Stalin, at our head, will march as before onwards and onwards, towards Communism! ' 2 In the Moscow trials, which are the theatrical staging of the party as the continuous process of purging and bloody self-devouring, the State is the Law fearing neither God nor man that proclaims to be the solar and integral realization of communist j ustice and, casting the traitor out of place into the anonymity of a vanished tomb, dissolves ethics purely and simply into terror. When one of the designated renegades, Bukharin, tries to stop the worst by straying from his obligatory script, look how he replaces the ethical principle, which alone is capable of justifying the terrorist superego, with the splaced principle of calculation, error, and, thus, politics. 312

Vyshinsky wants absolutely that Bukharin declare himself a B ritish or German spy, for that would exclude the accused from any place what­ soever in the space of the State, which is the only thing that is intoler­ able from the point of view of ethics and legitimizes the death penalty. B ukharin, subject to all kinds of violence and deprived of an affirmative subjectivity as political resistant, defends himself on this precise point with a rare stubbornness, going so far so as to treat his denouncers as provocateurs: Vyshinsky: I am asking you about connections with some police authority. Bukharin: I had no connections with any police authorities whatsoever. Vyshinsky: Then why was it so easy for you to join a bloc which was engaged in espionage work? Bukharin: Concerning espionage I know absolutely nothing. Vyshinsky: What do you mean, you don't know? B ukharin: Just that. Vyshinsky: And what was the bloc engaged in? B ukharin: Two people testified here about espionage, Sharangovich · and Ivanov, that is to say, two agents-provo cateurs. ( 38 3 ) When a declaration extorted from Khodjayev mentions a conversa­ tion about acts of espionage, B ukharin seeks support in his identity as an intellectual in order not to give in-just as he in a way will do in his final declaration with the famous theory of double consciousness, which allows him to surrender politically without annulling himself qua subject: Vyshinsky: Did you carry on a conversation [with Khodjayev at his country place] ? B ukharin: I carried on a conversation and kept my head on my shoulders all the time, but it does not follow from this that I dealt with the things of which Khodjayev just spoke; this was the first conversation . . . . Vyshinsky: It is of no consequence whether it was the first or not the first. Do you confirm that there was such a conversation? Bukharin: Not such a conversation, but a different one, and also secret. Vyshinsky: I am not asking you about conversations in general, but about this conversation. 313

TOPICS OF ETHICS

THEORY OF THE SUBJ ECT

Bukharin: In Hegel's 'Logic' the word 'this' is considered to be the most difficult word . . . . he is here not in the capacity of a philosopher but a criminal, and

division of the party, betrayal of that which stands for its soul, it is also necessary to evoke the unnameable ethical failure. And if it does not exist,

he would do better to refrain from talking here about Hegel's philosophy, it would be better first of all for Hegel's philosophy . . . .

then there is cause to invent it. What these flat and-as their future has shown-entirely empty horrors

Vyshinsky: I ask the Court to explain to the accused Bukharin that

Bukharin: A philosopher may be a criminal. Vyshinsky: Yes, that is to say, those who imagine themselves to be

warn us about is that the formal recognition of ethics as the only possible principle of self-condemnation (hence the sinister theatre in Moscow requires the confession and the abjection) changes into its opposite if the

philosophers turn out to be spies. Philosophy is out of place here. I am asking you about that conversation of which Khodjayev just

political content, of which ethics is supposed to be the remainder, happens

spoke; do you confirm it or do you deny it?

to be reduced to the objectivity of the party-State.

Bukharin: I do not understand the word 'that'. We had a conversation at the country house. (42 1 ) The symptomatic importance of this point, where ethics and politics in their contradictory articulation determine the abject status of the subject, is such that Vyshinsky ends up explicitly opposing the two terms: Vyshinsky: I will be compelled to cut the interrogation short because Y0\.l apparently are following definite tactics and do not want to tell the truth, hiding behind a flood of words, pettifogging, making digressions into the sphere of politics, of philosophy, theory and so forth-which you might as well forget about once and for all, because you are charged with espionage and, according to all the material of the investigation, you are obviously a spy of an intelligence service. ( 42 3 ) Thus, in order to disqualify Bukharin in his capacity a s subject, it is absolutely key to make him forget politics. The prioritizing of official adjectives attached to Liu Shaoqi's name as the emblematic target during the storm of the Cultural revolution, accord­ ing to which he, 'the No. 1 Party person in power taking the capitalist road, is a renegade, hidden traitor and scab who has concealed himself in the Party and is a crime-steeped lackey of imperialism, modern revision­ ism and the Kuomintang reactionaries' (GPCR 1 83-1 84), weaves together with precision that which pertains to politics in the thinkable frame of the struggle between two paths (modern revisionism, the capitalist road, ulti­ mately betrayal of the working class) and that which draws vigour from the purely ethical remainder (secret agent, imperialism, spy for Formosa, criminal) . 314

In all these cases, it does not suffice to overpower the adversary on the sole ground that he was the object to be combated. But underneath the

In order truly to arrive at ethics, we must at least not give up on politics as a subjective process, on communist politiCS. This is impossible if one chooses the wrong party, in all the senses of the expression. 1 3 The partisan mindset can certainly involve abnegation and obedience or, as Stalin says, 'conscious submission' and 'unity of will'. 14 Ethical courage amounts to the force to traverse anxiety, since this means nothing else but the capacity to consider oneself null. Who will say whether we can continuously do without this kind of annulling subjectivization? But the partisan spirit is also the reverse. When it is subordinated to politics, and not to organization, it demands absolute participation in the movement of the real, the detection of the breach from where to tip over into avant-gardistic destruction. Look at the directives of the Cultural Revolution with regard to the cadres: It is therefore imperative to persevere in the line of 'from the masses, to the masses'. Be pupils of the masses before becoming their teachers. Dare to make revolution and be good at making revolution. Don't be afraid of disturbances. Oppose the taking of the bourgeois stand, the shielding of Rightists, attacks on the Left and repression of the great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Oppose the creation of a lot of restric­ tions to tie the hands of the masses. Don't be overlords or stand above the masses, blindly ordering them about. 1 5 I n such circumstances, n o corporeal hierarchy can exempt you from the test of courage. If the party pretends to protect you from it, you should become the party all by yourself. You must in turn know how to consider the party as null, solely so that it continues to exist as the body of a subject. This captures the complete meaning of the maxim: 'Dare to go against the tide', about which Wang Hongwen (today in prison . . . ) at the 1 0th 315

THEORY OF THE S U BJECT

Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, in the purest style of Antigone, indicates to what extent we must see in it the complete opposite of the 'service of goods':

Classica l deto u r

When confronted with issues that concern the correct political line and the overall situation, a true Communist must act without any selfish considerations and dare to go against the tide, without fear of being

June 2, 1979

removed from his post, excluded from the Party, thrown in jail, forced to divorce, or put in front of the firing squad. 16 It is clear that here it is the very existence of the party itself that is at issue, since by giving in, one would gain only its statist desubjectivization, its counterrevolutionary termination. The ethics of Marxism consists in resolving the paradoxes of partisan­ ship on the solid terrain of the theory of the subject. This solution is accomplished in the division of one concept, confi­ dence, which depending on its point of application, contains the need for

Neither the sun nor death-Apogees and decadences-The four kinds of ethics-What happened not so long ago--D iscourses-Confident or

discipline and the inevitability of rebellion.

believing?

You can neatly distinguish, since always, two genres of ethics. Either you infer an ethics from the order of the world, to which the subject must correspond, without excluding the need for the contortions of the con­ verted; or you infer it from the subject's will, by no means dependent on the world's possibilities, without excluding that the world may order the repetition of this willing. This says as much as that the question is broached according to the splace or according to the outplace; according to subjectivization or according to the subjective process; according to the possible or according to the impossible. Let me add in passing that a maxim that is very much in vogue among parliamentary politicians, especially 'from the left', is the one that declares: 'Politics is the art of the possible.' Nowhere does the class nature of truth appear with such nakedness. This maxim for sure is true, and it may even be excellent, for them. As far as I am concerned, I posit explicitly that politics

is the art of the impossible. The outer border of the first ethical tendency affirms that an integral mastery of the knowledge of the world is accessible so that the right 316

317

THEORY OF THE SUBdECT

place of the subject is representable therein as its Good. From an absolute knowledge follows a complete reconciliation. Once past the cognitive conversion, the subjective process of wisdom is eternal. Herein we can recognize the seriousness of the axis of verticalization, in which the real and the law are reciprocatable without remainder. Certain variants of the communist idea resemble this theme of harmony, by which justice, unmoored from the subject. becomes a category of being. If any reserve of the excess dries up, it is actually its structural anchor­ ing that is struck by annulment. For the essence of all forms of wisdom lies in positing that one can eliminate the lack. Their doctrine is one of a full space. At the other extreme of the ethical field, we find the thesis that nothing is to be expected from being in terms of the subject's will. The world only ever offers you the temptation to give in. This is the story told in all the nineteenth-century novels of formation: the infinite, ethical or amorous subjectivity of the young man must learn its radical inadaptation to all objectivity. In order to become a well-placed and respectable character, he must take it down a notch. The novelist is the ironic historiographer of the betrayal of oneself. This figure can thus uphold the ethical process only in the tragedy of renouncing the world, in the unaltered process of pure subjectivization. This time we can recognize the intrinsic valorization of the excess over the excess, wherein it is a matter of maintaining oneself (most often in death) without ever letting oneself slide back into regressive subjectivization and recomposition. Typically, the metaphors of the first kind of ethics are diurnal and solar, as we see in Plato. Upon exiting the cave of shadows, one is blinded, the day appears in excess over its own light. The metaphors of the second kind are nocturnal and lunar. Consider Wagner, the second act of Tristan, where one is conversing on the bench of desire about the metaphysical advantages of death and the night. at least, that is, as long as the noble cuckold does not come and interrupt this obscene philosophical reunion

TOPICS OF ETHICS

'Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily: La Rochefoucauld observed, thereby dismiSSing both extreme forms of ethics.l7 This is because he opted for the nihilist version, from whose vantage point the other three can be observed with a particular sharpness. Besides, La Rochefoucauld is right in short-circuiting the two meta­ phors. Day and night belong to the same eras. All forms of wisdom, just as all existential dissidences, refer to times of height and to times of crisis. For if a vigorous ascending class is able to model history and the concepts of its speculation upon its force, this obviously is due to the fact that it hyposta­ tizes its will into the integral affirmation of the wisdom of the world, and to dissenters it leaves only the place of the general denial. of radical dis­ cordance. And if. inversely, we are in a ruinous and thoughtless epoch, in the putrefaction of the selfsame place where we remain and from which no new political subject is the internal excluded or the placed excess, then the opposite temptations-resigning oneself to the course of the world, supposed to be necessary, or withdrawing from it completely-begin to communicate from all sides. When the Greek city fell in ruins, to the sole benefit of the military, first the Macedonians and then the Romans, this is what the opposite and yet similar schools of Epicurus and the Stoics busied themselves with. There remains the case when, essentially neither good nor bad, the world is what the subject recomposes from a point where the subjective undecidable does not demand that one give up. The fact of discordance then is recognized as the out-of-place condition of subjectivization; that discordance is also taken up in a process of appropriation designates the subjective process of recomposition; and that there is discordance in this process connotes the regressive subjectivization insofar and whatever it induces in terms of repetition in the subjective process. Between day and night, the metaphor would be that of the carrier offire, which Mallarme-s star fixes without excess. Aeschylus made a tragedy out of it: Prometheus.

by introducing the symbolic principle of the embarrassing third, to which in the opera, between the guilty tenor and soprano, so many excellent basses devote themselves. The fact that in this night all cows are black, as Hegel objected against Schelling, is precisely a virtue for those who, in transgressing the pre­ scribed place and in deferring only to its local differential. want to have nothing to do with an exact discrimination of bovines. 318

2 There are four kinds of ethics: 1 . The ethics of praise, where one has a place of one's own within a world open to evaluation. 319

THEORY OF THE S U BJECT

2. The ethics of resignation, where one keeps to one's place in a devalu­ ated world. 3. The ethics of discordance, where one stands in the outplace of a place that is intrinsically devaluated. 4. The Promethean ethics, where one posits that the place is yet to come in a world open to re-evaluation, which the fire of j ust excess recomposes. The first two kinds of ethics refer to the whole; the last two, to the not­ all. This is a dialectical division of the rectangle. Another one immediately jumps off the page: the ethics of praise is optimistic (according to being), as is the Promethean ( according to the process) . Resignation and discordance are pessimistic. It is clear that these two attitudes refer to the primitive articulations of the subject, within a historical setting that puts them to the test. You will have no difficulty arguing the following:

concepts. Ethics is a position in the complete field of its four poles (praise, discordance, resignation, Prometheus ) , whereby one of them is never anything else than the way to gain access to the other three. Thus, the Giscardian conjuncture-let ,this be the name for the politi­ cal disarray that followed the disarray of the intellectuals after 1 976 at the latest-witnesses how the ethical debate of times of crisis makes a comeback. Does this mean that resignation suddenly imposes itself all by itself? No. First we must realize that, as the result of the years 1 966-73, there remains a Promethean reference whose denial is constitutive of the conjuncture in question. The 'critique of militantism', the refutations of Marxism, and the attack against the 'master discourses', are the neces­ sary passageways, and often the only substance, for the re-establishing of morals and rights. Secondly, we observe that the philosophies of desire, by relying on the cheap cuts of the previous upheaval-that is, the bourgeois liberation of mores-have spread a discordant nihilism that its corrosive power designated as the inevitable critical ally of resignations on the rise.

dissipation, but its imaginary limit is the theme of an absolute place, of

Finally, it appears that the intellectuals' consent for French imperialist society (parliamentary 'liberties', human rights, unionism, contempt for

a real splace, a limit which moreover is saturated with anxiety-look at the diagonals.

personal behaviour, cannot do without the collective praise that is latent

- resignation singles out the superego, the terrorizing order that has no need for disguising itself as value in order to ascribe the subject to the

in this kind of world order, praise that will have exploded (this future anterior is added in July 1 98 1 ) during the festivities in honour of the

law qua nonlaw. - discordance touches upon anxiety, which knows that it touches upon

it received the decoration of the provincial emblems of calm force.

- praise connotes justice, insofar as it follows the axis of the law's real

the real only through the inconsolable loss of the dead world. - Prometheus is the character who, in defiance of the gods, keeps the becoming of courage running on empty. On this basis we will posit that the first two kinds suture ethics to the subjective process, and the other two, to subjectivization; and that the dis­ tinction between optimism and pessimism goes no further than to repeat the intertwining of the strand-a and the strand-'V. The only interest of this approach would be to confirm that ethics gives us a name for the subject as historically realized in the form of discourse. It would be a fallacy to conclude that there exists an ethics of courage, another of the superego, and so on. It is misleading to follow the slope of the structure. A subject exists only through a historicized linkage of the four 320

TOPICS OF ETHICS

the Third World, and so on), even though it is limited at first to an ethics of

rose, where the intellectual plebs rallied en masse to the State, as soon as An ethical framework thus always arises within a complex saturated totality. The ethical debate subsumes any particular ethics. For, if ethics is that which a subject makes into the rule in terms of its conSistency, it can obtain this synthetic position only by the necessary nomination of the other possibilities. Beyond the descriptive categories that I have used, therefore, we must indicate the subjective formations of ethics, which do not coincide with the subject's concepts. These formations constitute discourses. Therein lies their difference from the subject's processes. An ethics designates explicitly a general articulation of the subject, which enters into its consistency and functions according to the regime of the aftermath or apres-coup. It is not part of the order of the imaginary either, since it traces no diago­ nal between the strands of a and 'V. Still, it is of course true that dogmatism and scepticism infect ethics as much as they saturate the subject. 321

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An ethics is the surname of an existing subject-effect. To lure you, I give you two of its surnames.

of a sizeable popular movement, my confidence begins to vacillate. I nev­ ertheless do not cease to believe in them, knowing full well that to vacil­

Belief is the discourse of the ethics of praise; confidence, that of

late defines the structure of the subject. This leaves us its history, which corresponds to what I have confidence in.

Prometheans. But the affair becomes more complicated when any idiot can realize that belief means confidence in the splace, whereas confidence is belief in the outplace. Between Prometheus and praise, it seems the difference is only that of the direction of a vector. If it is from the point of confidence that Marxism touches upon ethics, as I . . . believe is the case, then it should not surprise us that it turns back into belief. Confidence is this prepolitical arrangement, this remainder of calculable action, without which Marxism has never begun or rebegun. To fail means nothing, and it always happens. To fail is a category of politics. It is only to give in that belongs to ethics. Certainly those who give in argue on the basis of failures. But those are only discourses. The truth is that what constitutes failure as cause is the fact of having given in. In politics, it is to consistency that the failure incorporates itself. If after 1 973 one witnessed the 'failure' of the rebellious mass move­ ment of May-June 1 968, it was only from the point of a political proc­ ess-the party to come as consistency of the class subject-that it became possible to measure the extent to which the mass movement, required for any subjectivization, is a cause only insofar as it disappears. To argue based on this disappearance in order to settle down for a life of order actually means to abdicate the subject itself. Far from being able to evoke the 'movement's failure' as the cause for this abdication, we must be honest and rigorous enough to admit that one has failed oneself to hold steady in a and that. thus unhinged, the torsion-purely by means of isolating ",-no longer has a subjective valence and puts you purely and simply back into your place. In matters of Marxist politics and the subject of class, there is only one way of giving in, which is by losing confidence. From 1 976 onward, our intellectuals have lost confidence en masse, arguing instead-without being totally wrong about this-that they had never been more than believers. Does one always have to believe in order to have confidence? As far as I am concerned, I have confidence in the people and in the working class in direct proportion to my lack of belief in them. Insofar as I believe in them, which always induces the expectation 322

323

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the principle 'to each according to their needs'. Stripped to its bare bones,

Love what you wi l l never bel ieve twice

this certainty entails that at the end of the development of productive forces we encounter the withering away of the State. And such a certainty

June 9, 1979

is all the more acceptable when one considers that an entire scientific apparatus confers upon it the dignity of a modern belief. But the laws of algebra are imprescriptible, and it is indeed a Marxist algebra that is at work in political economy. From the standpoint of the subject, if it exists, the scientific serenity of economism necessarily issues into the following kind of lyrical declarations: Oh our fatherland! You are our powerful anchor. In order to defend your dignity, we fast. When we are gripped by hunger, We think of you

Belief and confidence-How Yukong moved the mountains-From yesterday to today-Nihilism and fatalism-The division of confidence­ 'And yet, this is the eve'

And all our pain vanishes. Oh President Mao ! You are the red sun that lights up our hearts. Following your teachings, we fight a frontal battle against the enemy. When we suffer terrible torture, We think of you And our body stops aching! , 9

If belief is what enables the possibility of salvation, and consequently the subject's potential eternity in a splacement which is finally real, confi­ dence is concentrated in the fidelity to courage, conceived as the differ­ ential of a recomposition which is more porous to the real, less exposed to the law. At the two extremities of Marxism, you will find the following theses: 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness' (Marx, Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) . 'Marxism implies manifold principles, but, in the final analysis, they can all be reduced to a single sentence: "It is right to revolt against the reaction­ aries'" (Mao, ubiquitous quotation during the Cultural Revolution) . 18 The first thesis may sustain you in the belief that communist con­ sciousness will necessarily emerge since the succession regulated by the contradictory becoming of a mode of production makes it so that, beyond capitalism, there is only the association of free workers and the reign of 324

Why? Because t o confide the becoming o f justice t o being means i n turn that the Just is one man. Only the superegoic humbling of oneself can put a stop to the imminent certitude of the objective end of the law. The belief in productive fatalism and the cult of personality are two sides of the same historical ethics. Stalin gives us its fusional version: five-year plans and the Little Father of the people make the same fixed point of belief and organize the one and only planetary praise. The Cultural Revolution is this ethics in its disjoined state. In the name of Mao, one thunders against Liu Shaoqi's 'theory of productive forces'. Yet, nothing less than the absoluteness of a thought was needed in order to fight the absoluteness of productive capitals. Belief against belief. It was even required to seek out the adversary on his own terrain, by showing how a complete submission to Mao's thought multiplied the production of tomatos, as in a materialist renewal of the miraculous catch of fish, or made it possible to build a ten thousand ton freighter, barehanded, in a shipyard hardly equipped for the assembling of simple boats. See for instance Selected Philosophical Essays by Workers, Farmers and Soldiers (Beijing, 1 972 ) . 325

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Above all, do not believe there is any hint of irony in what I am saying. Caught in the real movement whereby the communist recomposition

TOPICS OF ETHICS

the retreat of the masses, show that, if they were part of the movement,

furiously gropes its way, these texts carry a dialectical and moral grandeur

of '68 and its consequences, they never seriously partook in the subject whose evanescent cause they beheld in those occurrences. These people

against which the contentment of our miseries cannot raise any objection. The fact is that subjectivization follows the dictates of the discourse of

belong to the structure. They lived under the regime of self-identity, all the way to attaining the most complete disidentification. They only ben­

belief in order to shatter the obstacle.

efited from an ornamental belief. Now they tell us that they had taken 'the

The relation to the obstacle is the criterion of delimitation between confidence and belief, Promethean ethics and the ethics of praise. 'How Yukong Moved the Mountains', a fable Mao often made use of, focuses precisely on this delimitation. By attempting to move the mountain

masses' as a master-signifier. That is correct. But they should acknowledge that the event did not call for this. To tell the truth, there was nothing but a minor crack in the imperialist splace, of which the movement, which always comes to a close, was the algebraic cause. Those who, like we did,

with a pickaxe, old Yukong turns it into the pretext for an impossible

saw in the first place a lack (the subjective and political precariousness,

confidence. He courageously subjectivizes in discourse some point of the real-conceived as impossibility with respect to the rule-and takes it

the absence of a party) and not a fullness (revolt, the masses in the streets,

upon himself to divide this rule, that is, to attack the real, at the price of countless jibes. If the good genie then moves the mountain-the relay of

the liberation of speech) had something on which to nourish their con­ fidence, while the others had nothing left but the possibility of betraying their belief.

belief, now subordinated to confidence-one should not at all see in it the multinational wisdom whereby 'Heaven helps those who help them­ selves', but the conviction that having confidence in oneself, in the mode of the destructive scission of local constraints, generalizes the process of the subject. The genie is what everyone will do, thousands of men armed with pickaxes, as long as, against their resignation, you have been the Prometheus of a particular destruction. There is nothing here that is redolent of a logic of examples. The impor­ tant thing is to touch upon the real. No one will imitate you. You will simply have destroyed the belief in the obstacle, you will have displaced the place of the impossible. The essence of confidence lies in having confidence in confidence. This is why it is right to revolt. In other words, there is no useless courage. The idea of useless courage, like its anxious reverse, the Francoists' Viva la muerte, is nothing but the reactionary parody of ethics. Belief denies the obstacle precisely because it believes in it. If the good genie does not remove the mountain, it is because there is a reason for the mountain to be where it is. Clearly, I can circle around it to the sound of trumpets. Trumpet or pickaxe, that is the whole question. Belief adorns the obstacle with its allegoric discourse. Confidence, situated at the same point, digs deeper without waiting, and pays attention to the holes of which the rule prescribes the inoccupation without controlling all their neighbourhoods. Those who gave up on revolution, whether they talk about the Gulag or 326

2 Those ethics that lie between confidence and belief-neither Prometheus nor the sage-have something in common: they all claim that no path is ever opened to fill the gap between subjective evaluation and the norm of the world. These are ethics of the impasse. They exist necessarily, since it is true that every rule is an im-passe of the real. The difference between them lies in the fact that resignation takes the issue in terms of the whole-the kingdom of necessity-while discord­ ance, being reflexive, maintains evaluation to the point of risking death­ the nocturnal kingdom of freedom. The discourse of resignation is fatalism. The discourse of discordance is

nihilism. You should arrange the four discourses of ethics, enclosed in the subjec­ tive crossing, as in the diagram below. Let us explain the arrows. Fatalism pleads from the point of the superego (law nonlaw) in order to hold that the opposition between good and evil is inessential with =

regard to necessity. Like all discourses of transition, it is unstable. In the midst of a great storm, inflexibility might lead the fatalist, who confides in everything rather than in himself, to side with the subject of courage. During a period of glamour and order, he leans towards belief, since he 327

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THEORY OF THE SUBJ ECT

su bjective process

GO

belief

yield the way to the fascination of terror. The transitive action of passive nihilism results from the fact that it is always a defeated belief. a belief that has come undone. Alas, the trajectory which, beginning with belief. leads to fatalism by way of passive nihilism has been the trajectory of a considerable part of my generation. The final maxim of this process is 'We are right to be satisfied with little'-for instance, with Fran<;ois Mitterrand. This means that, initially, the 'It is right to revolt' was upheld exclusively through the fiction of a praise. The passive nihilist is more alien to us than the fatalist, since he has fatalism ahead of him. Conversely, active nihilism is, at the most obscure point of its argumen­ tation, polarized by an inapplicable confidence. One will say that this is a

confidence

subjectivization

has no firm mooring for the impasse and maceration. This time belongs to the beauties of the superego and, seen from afar and with the eyes of the fatalist, it vaguely resembles justice. It is not right to despair of the fatalist discourse. It is necessary to fight against it, targeting its weak point: the

crisis of confidence that precedes its object, while the crisis of belief within passive nihilism follows it. Today, the young are gladly nihilist. But passive nihilists can enlist them only by means of a temporary misunderstanding. In vain, they wish to convey to the young the idea that the essence of discordance consists in the defeat of beliefs, the crisis of ideologies, the crash of Marxism. For

oscillation between belief and confidence.

vigorous active nihilism is in search of a form of confidence and, if we are no more able to convey one to it directly than the passive nihilists, we can wait with . . . confidence.

In the factories, the fatalistic discourse is very well implanted. 'Workers will be workers', 'We will always be fucked over', 'Here nobody wants

up tolerating the world. The passive nihilist is already a realist, packing

to do anything', and so on. Defeatism is the spontaneous philosophy of proletarians. Although the coarseness and stupidity of this discourse are dis-couraging, for those who are enlightened by the theory of the subject it is nevertheless a divisible and precarious historical production. An organized micro-confidence (a communist workers' group) locally disrupts its rule. The question that we must be able to anticipate concerns rather the sudden temptation of belief. It is less important to mistrust the gloomy dis­ course of resignation than its immoderate future of praise. The party, that which is called the party, cannot rest content with the fact it is believed in. We do not promise anything, hence there is no reason to follow us. We demand and organize the partitioning of a confidence. The fatalist is thus an acceptable and risky interlocutor. As for nihilism, it knows two modes of emergence. As a figure of crisis and critical dissolution, it is passive if it does nothing but arrange into a discourse the call of anxiety to the superego. We all know these introverted and ravaged stances that immediately give in and 328

Active nihilism valorizes only itself. This is always better than to end his bags for the posts and places of social fate. The active nihilist inherits nothing. He never believed, and therein lies all his strength. Unless he joins religious sects, through which he will leap to the most rancid products of belief. he is a traveller without luggage, whose only future is courage, and it is toward this courage that his anxiety guides him by the sureness of the real. The active nihilist is particularly odious and particularly promising. Every day, he squanders the existential capacity of which he loudly declares himself the bearer. Talking to him has too many consequences for him to assent to it easily. He is indifferent to the recomposition of the world, as long as it has not been seized by a collective reckoning or touched by the restricted action of the avant-garde. The palindrome that serves as a title in Guy Debord's situationist film­ a cinematic balance-sheet of the achievements of twenty years ( 1 9 5 5-75 ) o f active nihilism- speaks about the active nihilist: 'In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni', 'Whirling we walk at night and we are consumed by fire: 329

TOPICS OF ETHICS

THEORY OF THE SUBJ ECT

We place all our hopes in the fact that this fire may consume the world,

exactitude of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It means seeing that the

offered by political confidence.

subject is also woven from W. Confidence in the party sustains justice with regard to anxiety through the delimitation of the superego. In this

Are we not in a condition-and here lies the place of the structure of the subject-to say with Samuel Beckett: 'In any case we have our being

way, it disconnects the imaginary diagonal that refers j ustice directly to anxiety.

in justice, I have never heard anything to the contrary'?20

Anticipation (of justice) and delimitation (of the superego) compose the divisible movement of the discourse of confidence. The anticipatory side-that of the masses-welcomes active nihilism. It

having once again become Prometheus' fire through the mediation

3

is always utopian-democratic, a gesture of abandonment, and its histori­ cal vulnerability easily fuses it to that aspect of nihilism which carries the

Let us situate confidence within the ethical debate. Itself oriented towards

bitter sovereignty of the subj ect. A confidence that is soaked in this bitter­ ness for too long is a drunken confidence. By short-circuiting belief, it risks turning into passive nihilism.

belief. it opens a way out for active nihilism, while fatalism is its halting point. Confidence organizes the entire ethical field. Like the other three dis­ courses, it prescribes some functions to its poles. Mao divides confidence, he divides the ethics of Marxist politics: We must have confidence in the masses and we must have confidence in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these princi­ ples, we shall accomplish nothing.2 1 The 'cardinal' character of these two principles is bound to their ethical Signification. Without them, Marxist politics has not even begun. We can

The delimiting side-that of the party-is oriented towards belief. It is gladly military and absolutist, exalting and glorifying its leaders. It is the bearer of the maintenance and tenacity of the political subject. The importance of its function-being the guardian of the distance from the vanishing of the masses, an effect of keeping on the edge within its own law-should not make one forget that. when confidence is closed off from active nihilism, it mutates and ossifies. An undivided confidence in the party only gives birth to a mediocre belief. If history, in its harsh passes, demands of us some excess of idolatry, some substantial love of

do precisely nothing, since the subject of the verb 'doing' remains incon­ sistent. Confidence is that from which class politics draws its cause (as remainder) and its consistency (as discourse of the subject ) . Confidence i s twofold. What does 'confidence i n the masses' mean? It

our apparatus-a body fallen prey to the four concepts of the subject-we should nonetheless remain alert and return from it by way of the tonic frequentation of nihilism and the sour taste of uprising.

means that the vanishing of the masses causes the Cause of communism;

All confidence is abandonment and discipline. This is what sets it out in the circuit that goes from nihilism to belief. The fourth figure always plays

that the political subject weaves itself from W but also from Cl; that the imaginary superegoic diagonal may be short-circuited. Confidence in the masses comes down to the fact that it is possible, and hence required, to disconnect courage, in flashes, from the imaginary diagonal that appeals to the superego, by gaining a foothold in the antici­ pation of j ustice. Such an anticipated effectuation confides the task of the subject to the active masses-the real cut within history'S rule. Conversely, confidence in the party comes down to particularizing the superego-effect ( special discipline, internal rules, sacrifices . . . ) . It means recognizing that recomposition is not the advent of an absolute splace. It means fending off the anxiety induced by j ustice, and to do so through the precision of the subjective process, the recomposing 330

Love what you will never believe twice.

the dummy. Fatalism is the dummy for the circuits of confidence. Confidence dispels the paradoxes of partisanship, since it is only from communism, as an immanent resource of the excess registered in the his­ toric cut of popular storms, that stem-in the second place-confidence in the party and the acceptance of its harsh rule. We have confidence in dictatorship in proportion to our concrete con­ fidence, which can be measured in step with politics, in the existence among the people of this subject through the effect of which the State shall be foreclosed. Each and every day, in the ordered labour that wagers on its effec­ tuation, warding off the joint chimeras of dogmatism and scepticism, the 331

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

discourse of confidence whispers to us: 'Yet this is the eve. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.' 22

Tra nslator's End notes a n d References

If the splendour of cities is often nothing but the effect of an indispensa­ ble and dreamy belief, it is nonetheless sufficient for us always to be able to say, in confidence as in truth: 'This is the eve.'

Translator's Introduction

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 26. 2 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 30. 3 Aside from the obligatory but generally short chapters devoted to Theorie du sujet in the available introductions to Badiou's philosophy, two early discus­ sions in particular stand out for their depth and detail: Natacha Michel's interview, in two parts, with Badiou on the occasion of the book's original publication in French, 'Re-naissance de la philosophie: Thiorie du sujet. Entretien avec Alain Badiou', Le Perroquet: Quinzomadaire d 'opinion 6 ( 1 982): 1 , 9-1 1; and ' Thiorie du sujet: Entretien avec Alain Badiou, 2: L e Perroquet 1 3-14 ( 1 982): 1, 1 0-1 3; and Claudine Haroche and Isabelle Michot-Vodoz, 'Autour de Theorie du sujet d'Alain Badiou', La ronde des sujets, special issue of DRLAV: Revue de Linguistique 30 ( 1 984) : 27-44. At the time, there were also four short book reviews published by Jacques Ranciere (in Bulletin des Revoltes Logiques), Catherine Clement (in Le Matin), Gilles Anquetil (in Les Nouvelles Litteraires), and Fran<;ois Regnault, 'Le Matheme emigre-Un sujet politique: L 'Ane 7 ( 1 982): 33-4. In English, see Bruno Bosteels, . Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject: Part 1. The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?' PLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12 (200 1 ) : 200-229; and 'Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism? Part II'. PLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 1 3 (2002): 173-208. Among the general introductions in English, see the sections devoted to Theory of the Subject in Jason Baker. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 40-43; Hallward. Badiou, 332

333

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

THEORY OF THE SUBJ ECT

3 1-41; and Oliver Feltham. Alain Badiou: Live Theory (London-New York: Continuum. 2008). 32-83. More recently. the book has attracted the attention of those whom I am tempted to call Young Lacanians. in analogy with the Young Hegelians in nineteenth-century Germany. See. in particu­ lar. Ed Pluth and Dominiek Hoens. 'What if the Other is Stupid? Badiou and Lacan on "Logical Time·... Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. ed. Peter Hallward (London-New York: Continuum. 2004). 182-90; Ed Pluth. 'Badiou and Zizek on Acts and Subjects'. Signijiers and Acts: Freedom in Isacan 's Theory of the Subject (Albany: State University of New York Press. 2007). 1 1 5-37; and Adrian Johnston. Badiou. Zizek. and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 2009). By contrast. despite the book's obvious interest for Lacanians. Theory ofthe Subject receives no mention whatsoever in Slavoj Zizek's own well-known analysis of Badiou in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London-New York: Verso. 1999). 1 27-70; nor in Yannis Stavrakakis. 'Excursus on Badiou·. The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis. Theory. Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press. 2007). 1 50-60. Zizek does respond to (my summary of) the book. in the Preface to the new edition of For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London-New York: Verso. 2002). Ixxxi-Ixxxviii. Back in France. on the other hand. a group of self-declared 'antiphilosophers' or 'antischolastics' on the fringes of academia takes Thiorie du sujet at least as seriously as Badiou's later works following L '/3tre et revenement. See Mehdi Belaj Kacem, Evenement et repetition (Auch: Tristram. 2004); Fabien Tarby. La philosophie d 'Alain Badiou (Paris: L·Harmattan. 2005); and Remy Bac. Le soustraction de retre: La question ontologique de la verite de Heidegger a Badiou (Paris: Le Grand Souffle. 2008). 4 Alain Badiou. Being and Event. trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum. 2005). 4 (translation slightly modified). 5 Alain Badiou. Thiorie du sujet (Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1 982). 46/28 (all subsequent references will include the page number of the French original followed by the page number in the present English translation. separated by a slash). Later in the book. Badiou suggests that perhaps there would be no more than two forms of the subject. one political and the other psycho­ analytical. whose topology we owe to Marx and Freud. See Theorie du sujet. 301 1285. 6 Alain Badiou. Conditions (Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1992). 234 n. 41. The notion of 'suture'. which is the process whereby philosophy abdicates its autonomous task and delegates the pursuit of truth to a single one of the four truth procedures that serve as its conditions (e.g.. to politics in the Marxist suture of philosophy. to science in positivism. to poetry after Nietzsche and Heidegger. and perhaps to love after Levinas) is discussed in 334

7 8

Alain Badiou. Manzfesto for Philosophy. trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press. 1 999). 61-7. Badiou. Manifesto for Philosophy. 108 (translation modified). Theory of the Subject. in this sense. stands as a grand philosophical summa and the most systematic conceptual formalization of Badiou's activism in the small Maoist organization (Groupe pour la fondation de) l'Union des Communistes de France marxiste-leniniste (UCFML). founded between the fall of 1 969 and early 1 970. and integrating ex-members split off from the Unified Socialist Party (PSU) in which Badiou had been active. and the ex-Gauche Proletarienne. with which Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel were affiliated. Right before the formation of the UCFML, Badiou had tried in vain to give shape to a 'party of a new type' from within the ranks of the PSU. See Alain Badiou, et al Contribution au probieme de la construction d'un part marxiste-Ieniniste de type nouveau (Paris: Maspero. 1969). For an overview of the role of Maoism in Badiou's philosophy. see Bruno Bosteels. 'Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics'. Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution. a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 1 3.3 (2005): 575-634. The same special issue also contains several translations and a complete bibli­ ography of documents pertaining to the period of Badiou's militantism in the UCFML. A wealth of information can also be found in the footnotes to the translation of Badiou's The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti­ Oedipus'. trans. Laura Balladur and Simon Krysl. Polygraph 1 5-16 (2004): 75-92. Unsigned. 'Sur le XXe siecle et la politique·. La Distance Politique 3 5 (200 1 ) : 3-4. The critique o f the party-form was partly responsible for the forma­ tion of Organisation Politique (OP). founded in 1 985 as a scission from the UCFML. For more information about the OP. see the theses of the group in the brochure Qu 'est ce que I 'Organisation politique? (Paris: Le Perroquet. 200 I ) . The best overview is still Hallward. 'Politics: Equality and Justice'. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. 223-42. Badiou also discusses some of the activities of this group in his interview with Hallward, reprinted as an 'Appendix: Politics and Philosophy'. in Alain Badiou. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding ofEvil. trans. Peter Hallward (London-New York: Verso. 200 1 ). 95-144. Badiou. Saint Paul. 2. Badiou. Theorie du sujet. 143-41 126. See also Alain Badiou. Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 985). I l2: 'Political organization is required for the intervention by way of the wager to make a process out of the gap between an interruption and a fidelity. In this sense, organization is nothing other than the consistency of politics: Badiou. Being and Event. 407. Badiou. Ethics. 80-87; and Alain Badiou. The Century. trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press. 2007). 65: 'The other path that the century .•

9

10 11

12 13

335

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14

15 16 17

sketched out-the one that attempts to hold onto the passion for the real without falling for the paroxysmal charms of terror-is what I call the subtractive path: to exhibit as a real point, not the destruction of reality, but minimal difference. To purify reality, not in order to annihilate it at its surface, but to subtract it from its apparent unity so as to detect within it the minuscule difference, the vanishing term that constitutes it: As an alternative to the path of destruction, Badiou thus returns to a concept­ the vanishing term-whose structural overtones he had criticized strongly in his earlier work. The reader should keep in mind, though, that these two paths-like all other major alternatives in The Century-are presented without any intrinsic hierarchical qualification or judgement. Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London­ New York: Continuum, 2009), 396. This line obviously echoes one of Mao Zedong's famous directives from the period of the Cultural Revolution: 'Without destruction there can be no construction' (June 8, 1966). In an interview with Peter Hallward and myself, Badiou also points out this reprise: 'I am obliged here to reintroduce the theme of destruction, whereas in Being and Event I thought I could make do with supplementation alone. In order for that which does not appear in a world suddenly to appear within it (and appear, most often, with the maximal value of appearance), there is a price to pay. Something else must disappear. In other words, something must die, or at least must die to the world in question', in Alain Badiou, 'Beyond Formalisation: An Interview', trans. Alberto Toscano and Bruno Bosteels, The One or the Other: French Philosophy Today, ed. Peter Hallward, special issue of Angelaki 8.2 (2003): 1 3 1 . See also Badiou's text, 'Destruction, negation, soustraction' (unpublished). Vladimir I . Lenin, 'The Three Sources and Component Parts of Marxism ( 1 9 1 3)" Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1 977), vol. 19, 2 1-8 (trans. modified). Badiou, Theorie du sujet, 1981 1 82. See also 'Hegel en France', in Alain Badiou, Joe! Bellassen, and Louis Mossot, Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique hegelienne (Paris: Franc;ois Maspero, 1978), 1 1-17. The thirteen footnotes in this pamphlet (published in the Yenan 'Syntheses' series edited by Badiou and Lazarus for the UCFML), which for the most part consists of the translation of the Chinese philosopher Zhang Shiying's text of the same title, serve as an excellent summary of Badiou's overall argument for a materialist dialectic in Theory of the Subject.

18 Badiou, Theorie du sujet, 36/ 1 8. 19 See, especially, Louis Althusser, 'Contradiction and Overdetermination' and 'On the Materialist Dialectic', For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London-New York: Verso, 2005), 87-128 and 16 1-2 1 8. Incidentally, Althusser's attempt 336

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

to circumvent what he considers the ironclad determinism of his own earlier, dialectical-materialist understanding of structural causality in For Marx and Reading Capital, an attempt which heavily relies on ancient atomism in his posthumous writings on the aleatory materialism of the encounter, can be said to have been pre-empted by his former student Alain Badiou in Theory of the Subject. See Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1 9 78-1 987, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London-New York: Verso, 2006). Of course, in his discussion of ancient atomism and the clinamen, Badiou also has in mind, albeit without mentioning them, Marx's doctoral dissertation, Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature ( 1 84 1 ), and Gilles Deleuze's important appendix, 'Lucretius and the Simulacrum', The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 266-79. 20 Badiou, Theorie du sujet, 1 281 1 1 0. Mallarme-s writing, needless to say, con­ stitutes a major touchstone for almost every thinker in the tradition of so­ called 'French theory'. This can be appreciated in the special section on 'The Central Case of Mallarme-, with excerpts from Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and others, in Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts: Postwar French Thought, vol. II, ed. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: The New Press, 200 1 ), 1 89-255. Badiou's reading in Theory of the Subject in particular owes much to the older work of Gardner Davies in Vers une explication rationnelle du 'Coup de des ': Essai d'exegese mallarmeenne (Paris: Jose Corti, 1953) and Mallarme et le drame solaire: Essai d'exegese raisonnee (Paris: Jose Corti, 1959). Its findings are summarized and then expanded in Badiou, 'La methode de Mallarme: soustraction et isolement: Conditions, 1 08-29. A complete overview of Badiou's Mallarme would also have to take into account Meditation 1 9 in Being and Event; 'A Poetic Dialectic: Labid ben Rabi'a and Mallarme- and 'Philosophy of the Faun', both in Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 46-56 and 1 22-41; 'Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise', trans. Bruno Bosteels, Theatre Survey 49.2 (2008): 1 87-238; and 'First Provisional Theses on Logic', in Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 1 1 9-24. Pierre Macherey discusses some of the peculiarities of Badiou's interpretation in The Mallarme of Alain Badiou', trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose and Gabriel Riera, Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 1 09-15. See also Jean-Jacques Lecercle's discussion of the paradoxes of Badiou's approach to poetry in general, in 'Badiou's Poetics', Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004), 208-17. Another useful point of comparison is Jacques Ranciere's brilliant but as yet untranslated Mallarme.· La politique de la sirene (Paris: Hachette, 337

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30

338

1996). See Badiou's comments on Ranciere's Mallarme, in Logics of Worlds, 562-4. Badiou, Thiorie du sujet, 1 5 1 1 1 33 and 1 541 1 36. Ibid., 1491 1 3 l . Ibid., 1 5611 38. Ibid., 1 781161. See also Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 57: 'In George Steiner's study of the historical appropriations of Antigone, he poses a controversial question he does not pursue: What would happen if psy­ choanalysis were to have taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure?' Badiou, Theorie du sujet, 182/1 65. See Jacques Derrida. 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"', trans. Mary Quaintance, Acts ofReligion, ed. GiI Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 230-98. Both Badiou and Derrida use the expression 'force of law' and relate it to an element of inherent 'nonlaw' (respectively non-loi and non-droit in French). Derrida does so in a close reading of Waiter Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence', Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1 978), 277-300. Zizek contributes to this debate in terms of the Benjaminian distinction between mythic and divine violence, among other places, in Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), but the reference to some form of nonlaw as the obscene supplement of enjoyment behind all public law is a constant in all of Zizek's work. For a more detailed discussion of this striking theoretical conjuncture, anticipated in Theory ofthe Subject, see Bruno Bosteels, 'Force of Nonlaw: Alain Badiou's Theory of Justice', Cardozo Law Review 29.5 (2008): 1905-26. Badiou, Theorie du sujet, 2041 187-8. Ibid., 2091193. Ibid., 2 101 1 94-5. With his commentary on Holderlin, Badiou is clearly answering, if not mimicking, Heidegger, whose poetic 'suturing' of philosophy can be said to originate in the German poet. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Holderlin 's Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000). See Badiou's own, partly apologetic explanation in Being and Event: 'We know what role the poets play, from Parmenides to Rene Char, passing by Holderlin and TrakL in the Heideggerean exegesis. I attempted to follow in his footsteps-with entirely different stakes-in Theorie du sujet, when I con­ voked Aeschylus and Sophocles, Mallarme, Hiilderlin and Rimbaud to the intricacy of the analysis' ( 10). In the context of French philosophy, on the other hand, Badiou's reading of Holder/in offers an intriguing counterpoint to that of the late Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. To appreciate this polemic, the reader may want to compare Badiou's meditation on Holderlin in Being and

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

31 32

33

Event, 255-6 1, with Lacoue-Labarthe's answers to the notion of the 'age of the poets' that Badiou proposes in 'L'age des poetes', part of a seminar edited by Jacques Ranciere, La politique des poetes: Pourquoi des poetes en temps de detresse (Paris: Albin MicheL 1 992), 2 1-63. Several texts in this polemic are now compiled and translated in Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. Jeff Port (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); see also the Translator's Introduction, titled 'The Courage of Thought', ix-xviii. For Lacoue-Labarthe's own independent approach to Holderlin's theatre in general and Antigone in particular, see 'De l'ethique: it propos d'Antigone', Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Albin MicheL 1 99 1 ), 1 9-36; and Metaphrase, suivi de Le theiitre de HiJ"/derlin (Paris: PUF, 1 998). Given the importance for Badiou of Holderlin's notion of 'reversal' ( Umkehr in German, retournement in French), the reader may also want to contrast Badiou's commentary with Catherine Clement, 'The Owl and the Nightingale: Hegel and Hiilderlin', Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O'Driscoll and Deirdre M. Mahoney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 994), 62-72; and Fran<;oise Dastur's Holderlin: Le retournement natal (La Versanne: Encre marine, 1 997). Badiou, Thiorie du sujet, 296/280. Ibid., 62144. The notion of 'referentiality', which Badiou adopts in Peut-on penser la politique? in order to explain the role of Marxism as an active politi­ cal referent, successively, in the workers' movement, the construction of socialist States, and the national wars of liberation, is borrowed from his friend and fellow-militant Sylvain Lazarus, writing under the pseudonym Paul Sandevince, in 'La fin des references', Le Perroquet 42 ( 1 984): 1 0. Marxism is in crisis, Badiou will argue similarly in Peut-on penser la politique?, because this system of referentiality has been exhausted. Badiou, Thiorie du sujet, 1461 128. Alberto Toscano has done much to retrieve this aspect of historical and political periodization in Badiou's work. See, for instance, 'Marxism Expatriated', Prelom: lournalfor Images and Politics 8 (2006): 1 54-69. Badiou, ibid., 1981 1 82.

34 3 5 Ibid. 36 Badiou, Being and Event, 1 (translation modified) . The extent to which this post-Cartesian doctrine of the subject may involve a philosophical anthro­ pology, not of finitude but of the infinite and the generic in the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach, is discussed in Nina Power, 'Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject', The Praxis ofAlain Badiou, ed. Paul Ashton, A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens (Melbourne: re.press, 2006), 309-38. 37 Badiou, Thiorie du sujet, 1451 127. 38 Badiou, Thiorie du sujet, 1 981 1 82. In Peut-on penser la politique?, Badiou

339

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

39

40

41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48

340

will similarly affirm: 'If Marxism is indefensible, this is because it must be started' (56); and later: 'We must redo The Communist Manifesto' (60). Jacques-Alain Miller, 'Action de la structure', Cahiers pour I 'analyse 9 ( 1 968): 93-1 05; 'Matrix', trans. Daniel G. Collins, lacanian ink 1 2 ( 1 997) : 44--5 1; 'Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)" trans. Jacqueline Rose Screen 1 8.4 ( 1977-8): 24-- 3 4. In French, Miller's early texts have been col­ lected and reissued in Un debut dam la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique?, 14. The UCFML, Badiou's Maoist organi­ zation at the time of Theorie du sujet, did devote two important studies to the political economy of so-called 'crisis capitalism' and 'state monopoly capi­ talism'. See Marxisme-Ieninisme et revisionnisme face a la crise economique (Paris: Maspero, 1 976) and Transformations du capitalisme (Paris: Maspero, 1 976). Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 7 1 . See Etienne Balibar, The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism', Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1970), 199-308; and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1 978-85); and The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-1 982, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005) . A useful, Althusserian-inspired interven­ tion in this debate can be found in Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). The work of the Argentine philosopher Lean Rozitchner, who does for Freudo-Marxism what Badiou does for Lacano-Althusserianism, goes to great lengths in order to bring out the necessarily religious, Christian matrix of capitalist subjectivity. See especially his book on Saint Augustine, which offers a useful counterpoint to Badiou's book on Saint Paul and to his reading of Christianity in Theory of the Subject: Lean Rozitchner, La Cosa y la Cruz: Cristianismo y capitalismo (En torno a las Confesiones de san Agustin) (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1997). Parts of this work have been translated into English in Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture & Politics 19/20 (2008): 33-53. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 4 (trans. modified) . Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 86. Alberto Toscano discusses the continuity between Theory of the Subject and Logics of Worlds in terms of this complex subjective space as opposed to the rather more monolithic subject of fidelity that can be found in Being and Event, in 'The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of Politics', The Praxis ofAlain Badiou, 339-66. Logics of Worlds, 39 1 . Ibid., 375 (trans. modified). Ibid., 83 (trans. modified to restore the italicized stress of the original). Badiou, 'Philosophy and the "death of communism''', in Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 126-7.

Preface

2

3 4 5

'To introduce myself into your tale' (M'introduire dans ton histoire) is the title of a poem by Stephane Mallarme, which in turn is comparable to Horace's De te fabula narratur ('It is a tale told for you' or 'The joke is on you')-also one of Marx's many favourite references from the classics and, more gener­ ally, a common phrase used in prefatory remarks. See, for example, Auguste Comte, Discours sur l'ensemble du positivisme (Paris: L. Mathias, 1848), 1 26. For Comte, each proletarian is a spontaneous phi­ losopher and each philosopher is a systematic proletarian-with 'proletar­ ian' carrying above all a moral or spiritual sense as opposed to the political and economical uses of the term in Marx. A reference to Franc;ois Mitterrand's election to the Presidency in France, in May 1981, and the resulting celebrations in favour of the 'rose' of French socialism. An obvious pun on 'index' as a list of prohibited works. Julien Gracq, Lettrines (Paris: Jose Corti, 1 967), 138-40. Badiou uses a shorter quotation from the same fragment in his conference 'The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics', included in Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London-New York: Verso, 2006), 281-2. Part 1. T h e Place o f t h e Subjective

On September 14, 1967, Mao is reported to have stated: 'Within the working class, there is no basic clash of interests. Under the proletarian dic­ tatorship, the working class has absolutely no reason to split into two hostile factional organizations' ('Directives Regarding Cultural Revolution', Selected Works, vol. 9). Available online at http://www.marxists.org. 2 In French, this sentence combines an almost gnomic appeal with an every­ day, colloquial simplicity: Tout �a qui est se rapporte a fa dam une distance de fa qui tient au lieu ou fa est. An alternative translation would be: 'Every it that is relates to it in a distance to it that stems from the place where it is: The reader should also keep in mind that fa in French serves as the official translation of Freud's id (German es, as in the famous dictum Wo es war, soli Ich werden) . 3

This sentence, both in its style and in its content, echoes the one annotated in the previous note. In French: Tout ce qui est d'un lieu revient sur la part de lui-m€me qui en est determinee pour deplacer la place, determiner la determination, franchir la limite. Etre d'un lieu could also be translated in set-theoretical

terms as 'to belong to a place', especially since a few lines down Badiou himself will introduce for the first time the opposition between belonging and inclusion, borrowed from set theory. 4 In French: Tout ce qui est d'un tout luifait obstacle en tant qu 'il s 'y inclut. Based on 341

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5

6 7

8

9

10

II

342

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

the opposition between belonging and inclusion, I have translated etre d'un tout as 'belonging to a whole'. Another translation for un tout could be 'a total­ ity', and the reflexive s 'y inclut could also be rendered as 'includes itself in it'. The French expression peu de realite ('scant reality') is often invoked by Badiou in ways similar to Lacan's usage. As Bruce Fink annotates in hjs Translator's Endnotes to Lacan's Berits, it was Andre Breton who introduced the expression in his 1 924 'Introduction au iliscours sur le peu de rea lite', Point dujour (Paris: Gallimard, 1 97 0 ) . In French: Jl faut tenir hors lieu. Other translations could be 'We must stay out of place' or 'It is necessary to hold off place'. Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson ( O xford: Oxford Uruversity Press, 2000 ) , Part I, Prop. 1 0, Schol. In French, passe en force is a strict homonym for pas sans force, 'not without force'. Passer en force refers to the violent movement of 'pushing through' a law or a decision, of 'opening a passage' or 'imposing one's way' by force. Ce qui passe en force could thus be translated as 'what pushes through by force' but this would have meant losing out on the wordplay between impasse and passe that Badiou is developing here as part of his attempt to go a step beyond Lacan. Lenin's phrase in actual fact states that 'politics is a concentrated expression of the economy', as Badiou correctly quotes below. The suggestion of expressiv­ ism, no doubt, makes this less palatable to the Althusserian in Badiou, insofar as Althusser in his canonical work adamantly opposes all such expressive links between the different instances of a social totality and this totality itself. See Vladimir 1. Lenin, 'Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation, and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin', Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1 96 5 ) , vol. 32, 70- 1 07: 'I said again in my speech that politics is a concentrated expression of economics, because I had earlier heard my "politi­ cal" approach rebuked in a manner which is inconsistent and inadmissible for a Marxist. Politics must take precedence over economics. To argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of Marxism. Am I wrong in my political appraisal? If you think so, say it and prove it. But you forget the ABC of Marxism when you say (or imply) that the political approach is equivalent to the "economic", and that you can take "the one and the other": Lacan introduced this expression in his 1 97 1-2 Seminar XIX: . ou pire. See Autres eerits (Paris: E ilitions du SeuiL 200 I ) , 547-52 . Literally, the expression means 'There's one' or There's some one'. Bruce Fink, in his translation of Lacan's Seminar XX: Encore from the following year proposes 'There's such a thing as One' (S XX, 1 2 8 ) . Hegel's Tiitigkeit, translated as 'act' in English, is rendered as le faire in the French translation used by Badiou. For this reason, I have kept both expres­ sions, 'act' and 'making', in translating Badiou's paraphrase of Hegel. Faire is .

12

13

14 15

16 17

18

19

20

.

21

an enormously flexible verb in French, and, as I will indicate for a number of instances below, this is all the more true in Theory ofthe Subject. For Faust's ilifferent readings of the line from the Gospel according to John, 'In the beginning was the Word', all the way to the conclusion 'In the beginning was the Deed', see Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. David Luke ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 998), verses 1 224- 1 2 3 7 . In German, lm Anfang war der Tat echoes the lines from Hegel's Science of Logic about Tat and Tiitigkeit just quoted by Badiou. In French, the expression passe en force, commented upon above, is here applied to sa place, the place of the subject. Alternative translations might be 'pushes through (past) its place', 'passes its place as force' or even 'makes its place pass into force' . S e e Joseph Stalin, 'Foundations o f Lenjnism ( 1 924)" Leninism, trans. Eden & Cedar Paul (London: George Alien & Unwin, 1 928), 1 7 3 . In this paragraph and the previous one, Badiou is playing on justesse, 'right­ ness' or 'correctness', and justice, 'justice'. In English, 'right' or 'just' ideas translates des idees justes. In French, fait parti literally means 'makes (up) a party' or 'makes for a party', 'constitutes a party', but also 'plays or performs the role of party'. In French, (a fasse je picks up on the sentence commented upon above (note 2 ) , with (a again having both a common meaning, as in any 'it' or 'something' whatsoever, and a technical meaning as the equivalent of the Freudian id. Faire, too, is notoriously flexible and involves both an active 'making' or 'doing' (as in the act or deed from Goethe's Faust) and an intran­ sitive 'becoming' or 'coming into being' (as in Freud's dictum Wo es war, soli !ch werden, 'Where it was I shall come into being' ) . The term translated a s 'protesting' i s revendicatives i n French. This refers to the trade unionist figure of politics, based on 'demands', 'claims' or 'vindi­ cations' as protestations against injustice and exploitation, usually aimed at the State. For Badiou, the term for this reason is mostly pejorative. In this sentence and the previous one, the verb used in French is once again faire, 'making', 'practising', 'forming', 'constituting' and so on: la bourgeoisie fait de la politique and la bourgeoisie fait sujet. 'Where there is oppression, there is resistance' is a phrase commonly attrib­ uted to Mao Zedong. Laura Balladur and Simon KrysL in their careful trans­ lation of Badiou's 'The Party and the Flux', annotate this phrase as follows: 'For all its future resonance, the "origin" of the phrase is elusive: some C hinese sources suggest its source may not be in Mao's writings at all. Mao used the phrase in his interview with Edgar Snow ( 1 /9, 1 96 5 ) : it continued to recur during the Cultural Revolution and was forced-of all places-into the Joint Communique from Rkhard Nixon's 1 972 visit to China: Practise Marxist politics translates the French faire de la politique marxiste. 343

END NOTES AND REFERENCES

THEORY OF THE S U BJECT

Quel sepulcral naufrage (tu Le sais, ecume, mais y baves) Supreme unt entre les epaves Abolit le mat devetu

Other possible translations include 'make' or 'do' or 'put into practice' Marxist politics. The emphasis of faire is on the active, militant, organized nature of Marxism qua politics. Part n. The Subject under the Signifiers of the Exception

2

3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10

11 12

13

In French, la destruction d'une qualite de force can be read as both an objective and a subjective genitive, that is, as 'the destruction of or by a certain quality of force'. Another half-colloquiaL half-gnomic sentence: Du reel, a force de le tordre, ils no us donnent le jus, in which 'force' by 'torsion' extracts all the 'juice' from the real. The sentence plays on pluie des astres, 'rain of falling stars', and desastre, 'dis­ aster' . Mallarme, 'Igitur', (Euvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1 9 5 1 ) , 44 1 . In French, le passeur sur places de la force evokes the figure of the passeur or 'passer' within the Lacanian procedure of la passe. For Badiou, the emphasis is on the act of passing an element of force onto a system of places in such a way that this element not only remains in the same spot but also makes the original force disappear. Here, in a nutshell, we are given a logic of the mark, which will be more familiar to readers of Derrida. De-marque, 'de-marcated', can also mean 'marked down' or 'discounted', as with merchandise on sale. The sentence is structured around the pun on the homonymous point reel, 'real point' or 'point of the real', and point reelle, 'not at all real.' In French, the sentence plays on the internal rhyme between font l'histoire, 'make history', and sont l'histoire, 'are history'. In French, this one-liner brings together the word play on font/sont and dis­ para/tre/pour etre: Elles font ce qu 'elles sont, mais en disparaissant pour €Ire. Badiou is alluding to Mallarme-s sonnets 'Victorieusement fui le suicide beau' ('The fine suicide fled victoriously' CP 69) and Tout Orgueil fume-t-il du soir' ('Does every Pride in the evening smoke' CP 7 3 ) . The expression 'produces movement' translates the French fait mouvement. In French, en personne can also mean 'in no one' or 'in nobody', which is consistent with Mallarme-s idea ( mentioned below) of logic as impersoni­ fied reason. The reader may wish to turn to Mallarme's poem in French, quoted from his (Euvres completes: A la nue accablante tu Basse de basalte et de laves A meme les echos esclaves Par une trompe sans vertu

344

Ou cela que furibond faute De quelque perdition haute Tout l'abime vain eploye Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traine Avarement aura noye Le flanc enfant d'une sirene

14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21

To avoid imprecision in the translation, a good strategy is to compare and combine the available English renderings. Thus, in what follows, I selec­ tively rely on translations and paraphrases of Mallarme-s poetry from both Oxford University Press and the University of California Press. One error common to both editions is the failure to understand a meme as meaning 'flush with' or 'right up to', referring to the proximity of the basse de basalte et de laves to les echos esc/aves. The expression 'the lack of being' in this case is a translation of le defaut de l 'etre, following the model of le manque a €Ire. Defaut can also mean 'defect', 'shortcoming', 'failing' or 'fault'. The expression 'to put at fault' here translates mettre en defaut. Another translation could be 'to cause to default', which in the present context would mean to reveal the place where society is shown to be wanting or lacking. Mallarme, Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, ed. and trans. Rosemary Lloyd ( C hicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1 988), 77. In addition to 'meaning', sens could also be translated as 'sense' or 'direc­ tion', which would be consistent with the leap provoked by the poetic operation of annulment in Mallarme-s case. A play on coup de force and coup de la force. Mallarme, (Euvres completes, 428. Another translation for fait theorie du sujet would be 'makes a theory out of the subject'. Badiou here is entertaining the option of adding another tercet (entirely of his own invention) to Mallanne's poem: Morte a l'exces qui fut son chant Sinon qu'annule de sa haine Le mat d'ecume naufrageant

22

On the notion of the party as 'advanced detachment of the working people' (actually a quote from Lenin ), see Joseph Stalin, 'Concerning Questions 345

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

23

24

25

26 27

28 29

30 31 32

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34 346

of Leninism (January 25, 1 92 6 ) " Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1 9 54), vo!. 8, 1 3-96. O n the party a s 'leadership nucleus' and as 'powerful nucleus for the whole people', see among other places Mao Zedong, 'Preliminary Conclusions of the Land Investigation Campaign (August 29, 1 9 3 3 ) " Selected Works, vo!. 6; and 'The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War ( October 1 9 3 8 ) " Selected Works, vo!. 2. All quotations available online at http : //www.marxists.org. On the notion of 'open wide', see Mao Zedong, 'Speech at the C hinese Communist Party's National Conference on Propaganda Work (March 1 2, 1 9 5 7 ) " Selected Works, vo!. 5. This notion is also discussed at some length in the Circular from May 1 6, 1 96 6 that heralds the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China. A reference to the song 'The Internationale': 'C 'est la lutte finale/ Groupons­ nous, et demain/ L'Internationale/ Sera le genre humain' ( 'This is the final struggle/ Let us gather together, and tomorrow/ The Internationale/ will be the human race' ) . Mao, 'Talk O n Questions O f Philosophy ( 1 964)" Selected Works, vo!. 9. Mallarme, (Euvres completes, 433. English translation by Mary Ann Caws available online at http: / /www.studiocleo.comllibrarie/mallarme/prose. htm!. Mallarme, (Euvres completes, 44 1 . Here Badiou, in a n astounding if not scandalous feat, quotes a series of consecutive lines from A Dice Throw, all the while erasing the typographical differences and similarities between them in terms of font type and size. In French, this 'flat' rendition reads as follows: 'Rien de la memorable crise ou se fUt l'evenement accompli en vu de tout resultat nul humain n'aura eu lieu (une elevation ordinaire verse I'absence) que le lieu, inferieur clapotis quelconque comme pour disperser I'acte vide abruptement qui sinon pa� son mensonge eilt fonde la perdition, dans ces parages, du vague en quO! toute rea lite se dissout' ( Thiorie du sujet, 1 1 2; cf. (Euvres completes, 474-5 ) . , References, respectively, to 'Another Fan (Belonging to Mile Mallarme) and 'Herodias ( Scene ) ' . This is from the sonnet 'Tout Orgueil fume-toil du soir' ('Does every Pride in the evening smoke ' ) . These three terms are taken from the consecutive sonnets 'Does every Pride . . .', 'Surgi de la croupe et du bond . . .' ( 'Arisen from the rump . . . ' ) , and 'Une dentelle abolit . . .' ('A lace vanishes . . . ' ) . I n French, the sentence i s somewhat ambiguous: C'est maniere de force que de jouer pour fin ir avec la fascinante et impersonelle seduction des signifiants separables. In French, conscience means both 'conscience' and 'consciousness'. Badiou

35

is exploiting this double meaning, as the subsequent allusion to class­ consciousness makes abundantly clear. In French, Mallarme's sonnet reads as follows: Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx L'Angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore, Maint reve vesperal brille par le Phenix Que ne recueille pas de cineraire amphore Sur les credences, au salon vide: nul ptyx, Abolit bibelot d'inanite sonore, (Car le Maitre est alle puiser des pleurs au Styx Avec ce seul objet dont le Neant s'honore) . Mais proche l a croisee a u nord vacante, un or Agonise selon peut-etre le decor Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe, Elle, defunte nue en le miroir, encor Que, dans l'oubli ferme par le cadre, se fixe De scintillations sitat le septuor.

36 37 38

Forthe English version, I have used Weinheim's translation from the University of California Press, all the while replacing 'Anguish' with 'Anxiety'. See Mallarme, (Euvres completes, 1490. See Selected Letters of Stephane Mallarme, 87. Another translation for ce qui fait ici sujet de i'angoisse could be 'whatever turns anxiety here into a subject'. Part Ill. Lack and Destruction

2

See Hegel's famous line in The Phenomenology of Spirit: Time is the Notion itself that is there and which presents itself to consciousness as empty intuition' (Ph 487 ) . Badiou misquotes the original German, as if Hegel had written 'die Zeit ist der Begriff da', whereas the actual line from the original reads: 'Die Zeit ist der daseiende Begriffselbst'. Alexandre Kojeve also comments on this passage in 'A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept', Introduction to the Reading of Regel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. ( New York: Basic Books, 1 969), 10 l . Finally, Badiou introduces a pun on la, 'there', which translates the German da, and le la du diapason, the 'la' of the tuning fork. I have tried to retain something of this pun by using the expres­ sion 'that sets the tone'. The French here uses se clive, 'splits', and clivage, 'splitting' . Another transla­ tion could be 'cleaves off' and 'cleavage' or even 'scission'. Badiou clearly has in mind the Maoist connotations of the logic of splitting or scission, as 347

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in the slogan 'One divides into two', suggested by the Lacanian quand un fait deux. The French here is quite convoluted: la theorie analytique tient cette equivoque dans !'instruction du desir d'ou s 'apprehende le sujet, which could also be trans­ lated as 'the theory of psychoanalysis holds this equivocation to be instruc­ tive about the way the subject can be apprehended on the basis of desire'. The reader should keep in mind that this simplification of the world also refers to Mallarme's definition of the act, alluded to above: 'The one avail­ able act, forever and alone, is to understand the relations, in the meantime, few or many; according to some interior state that one wishes to extend, in order to simplify the world' ('Music and Letters', D 1 87 ) . , An allusion to Mallarme's 'Prose (for des Esseintes) . Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in vol. 14 of his Collected Works, trans. Abraham Fineberg: 'Frankly and bluntly did Bishop Berkeley argue! In our time these very same thoughts on the "economical" elimination of "matter" from philosophy are enveloped in a much more artful form, and confused by the use of a "new" terminology, so that these thoughts may be taken by naive people for "recent" philosophy ! ' ( 2 8 ) . A reference to Xavier (brother of Joseph) de Maistre's Voyage autour de ma chambre ( 1 790), translated as A Journey around my Room, foreword Alain de Botton, trans. Andrew B rown (London: Hesperus Press, 2004). 'Half-saying' here translates Lacan's m i-dire, that is, the notion that truth can only be 'half-said' or 'half-spoken', whereby mi-dit is an obvious, Mallarmean-sounding homonym for midi, 'noon' or 'midday'. In his unpublished seminar on Lacan's antiphilosophy, Badiou discusses at length the differences and similarities between Lacan's 'half-said' and Mallarme's 'midday', compared to Nietzsche's 'noon' as the time of the 'shortest shadow'. The French here, mi-di(t), combines into a single word the otherwise homonymous mi-dit ( 'half-said') and midi ('noonday' or 'midday' ) . Badiou may b e thinking o f Louis Althusser's discussion o f the universal and the specific, in For Marx, trans. Ben B rewster ( London-New York: Verso, 200 5 ) , 1 8 3 . 'Discrepancy' here translates decalage, a term especially dear to Badiou's former teacher Althusser ( notably in his early reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau). which can also mean 'intervaL 'lag', or 'gap'. See Althusser. 'Rousseau: The Social Contract (The Discrepancies)', Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left B ooks, 1 972), 1 1 3-60. The French une mise en biais ( 'slanting' ) could also be translated as 'a putting askew', 'a sideways glance', or a 'looking awry', as in the eponymous book by Slavoj Zizek. 'Twisted' here translates tordu, as in that which underwent a torsion, not straight.

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

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Before quoting Lacan, Badiou uses the following expressions: l'etre-a-cote ('being-to-the-side'), l'etre-para (' para-being'), du par-etre ('par-appearing ' ) . Bruce Fink's explanation i s useful i n this context: 'The neologism Lacan creates here, par-etre, is pronounced exactly like par-aftre, which means 'to appear' or 'appearing'. Two sentences further on, Lacan intends both meanings when he says that 'being presents itself. always presents itself, by par-etre', i.e., by appearing and being beside (or alongside ) ' (S XX, 44-5 n. 19). I n French, paravent ( 'smokescreen' o r 'screen' ) adds a further pun to the Lacanian neologisms based on par-etre. In French: 'Nous ne sommes rien, par-soyons le Tout', which is a clear allusion to another famous line from 'The Internationale': 'Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout'. The effect of introducing Lacan's neologism of par-etre into this line consists in slanting the view away from the dogmatic totality toward what lies beside or alongside the whole. The French sceau ('seal') could also be translated as 'mark', 'stamp' or 'stamping' . In the discussion of Mallarme above, I used 'seal' to translate frappe and 'stampings' for timbrages. See Lenin, 'Once Again on the Trade Unions, the Current Situation, and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin', Collected Works, vol. 32, 70- 1 07. For Lacan, the best that this bien-dire or 'well-saying' can amount to is a mi-dire, 'half-saying' or 'half-stating'. See Lenin, 'Marxism and Insurrection', Collected Works, vol. 26, 22-7: 'Of course, this is all hy way of example, only to illustrate the fact that at the present moment it is impossible to remain loyal to Marxism, to remain loyal to the revolution unless insurrection is treated as an art'. The suggestion is that Lacan, the Lenin of psychoanalysis, can also be its Mao, insofar as Lacan I and Lacan II would be like a king succeeding himself. Also implied is the notion that Jacques-Alain Miller, though a Maoist around 1 968, is not the Mao of psychoanalysis. The French here, referring to Lacan's droiture a tenir sur la torsion (' his steady uprightness about torsion' ) , continues the series of puns on straightness, rightness, steadiness, and torsion. In French, the word translated as 'practice' in English is not pratique but experience, just as in the previous sentence Marxism is defined as le propos experimente de soutenir l'advenue subjective d'une politique. Experience and experimente, in this context, should not be read with the existential pathos of experience but in the sense of a formal and practical experiment, similar to what happens in inventive science or in artistic innovation. An allusion; with inverted gender, to Detruire, dit-elle, the title of a famous novel and film by Marguerite Duras ( 1 969), ostensibly inspired by May '68. Beyond this reference, the expression, even in the masculine form Detruire, 349

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THEORY OF THE S U BJECT

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dit-if as used by Badiou, has taken on a life of its own and is frequently invoked in literary and artistic circles. An allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche's well-known remark, in a letter to Brandes from December 1 888: 'I prepare an event that. in all likelihood, will break history in two, to the point where a new calendar will be needed, and in which 1 888 will be the Year I . ' In rej ecting this view, Theorie du sujet clearly anticipates Badiou's conclusion, in a conference from 1 992 on Nietzsche, about the 'antiphilosophical' nature of this 'break' qua archipo­ litical 'act' of grand politics. See Badiou, Casser en deux l'histoire du monde? (Paris: Les Conferences du Perroquet, 1 992 ) . The French, sceau, was previously translated a s 'seal' but here a s 'stamp' so as to retain echoes of the pun on the homonymous saut, 'jump'. Jacques-Alain Miller. 'Matrix', trans. Daniel G. Coliins, lacanian ink 1 2 ( 1 99 7 ) : 48-9 (trans. modified ) . The French here, De la q u 'il fait sujet, could also b e translated a s 'Whence its quality as subject', 'From this it follows that it makes (for) a subject', or This explains why it constitutes a subject'. The use of an indefinite article in English, however. might wrongly suggest that there are several-or at least two-subjects (the proletariat and the bourgeoisie), whereas Badiou is correcting himself precisely on this point so as to affirm, as he did in the previous session of his seminar: 'There is only one political subject, for any given historicization.' In French, the expletive ne that usually accompanies negation is absent: le sujet aboutit a rien (which I have rendered as 'the subject leads to nothing'), as opposed to le sujet n 'aboutit a rien (which could be translated as 'the subject does not lead to anything' ) . In French, se fait and s 'effet, with the latter being a neologism on Badiou's part, are homonymous. The whole sentence, though, is quite obscure: la politique prolitarienne . . . est ce qu 'elle se fait (s 'effet) ne pas etre (s 'effet qui a nom 'communisme'). The basic underlying idea is that the proletariat, like the unconscious, brings into being some element of nonbeing. Or, rather, through the unconscious and the proletariat, the ontological opposition of being and nonbeing itself is subverted. The French, la botte in c'est la bottet, refers to a special coup, for example in fencing, or a secret weapon, unrecognized by the adversary. Porter une botte a quelqu 'un thus can mean to attack or interpellate someone in an unforeseen way. The French expression, s 'adosse a u (here translated a s 'leans u p against') beautifully conveys an image of truth with its dos ('back') up against the real. In French, une plaie ( 'a sore') here also means 'a pain (in the neck ) ' or 'nuisance'.

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Badiou, i n personal conversations with the translator, suggests that 'mes tortillons' could refer to the twisted elucubrations in Lacan's brain, but I have the impression that Lacan is rather referring to his students and disciples and their mental elucubrations. My translation tries to keep the ambiguity alive. 'Jams up' here translates the French coince, a notion Badiou will discuss below in the context of Lacan's topologies. Other translations could be 'wedges' or 'traps'. 'Blocks' here translates the French fait coincement. The French here, changer l 'homme dans ce qu 'il a de plus profond, corresponds to the first sentence of the famous 'Sixteen Points' decision, adopted by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on August 8, 1 966, marking the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In English, the full line reads as follows: 'The great Proletarian Cultural Revolution now unfolding is a great revolution that touches people to their very souls', in The Chinese Cultural Revolution: Selected Documents, ed. and with notes by K. H. Fan (New York-London: Monthly Review Press, 1 968), 1 62 . See also Badiou's comments in 'The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?', trans. Bruno Bosteels, positions: east asia cultures critique 1 3 (200 5 ) : 489-90. In French, this whole sentence is a bit convoluted: Tenons la prise, piutot, d'un biface subjectif dont l'articulation nous donnera de la peine, pour y jointer la destruction ficondante et le bonheur d 'y manquer. The reference to le bonheur d'y manquer counters Lacan's mention of the happiness to be alive, quoted above. In French, morgue can mean both 'morgue' or 'mortuary' and 'arrogance', 'smugness', 'superciliousness'. I have tried to keep hints of both meanings by using 'deadly arrogance' as a translation. In French, au-dela ou en de,a ( 'beyond or shy of') is also used by Lacan, S XX, 44. The French here, mise en defaillance, is translated as 'the active failure'. Another possible rendering would be 'the putting into failure'. In French, droits. This extends the pun, used earlier, o n 'right' ideas and 'twisted' paths to truth. Here, in addition, the opposition is between 'straight' and 'contorted' . 'Lapses back' here translates retombe, which previously, in Part t served as the French translation of Hegel's Ruckfall, 'relapse', in the dialectical process. In the notation of the 'mathemes' of anxiety, the superego, courage, and justice, I have used 'locus' for lieu, whereas elsewhere 'place' serves to trans­ late both lieu and place. The mathemes are one of the few instances in Thiorie du sujet where these two French terms are kept separate. This is an allusion to a famous saying which the old Mao frequently used to 351

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45

refer to the international situation during the Cultural Revolution. It was published in Renmin Ribao (People's Daily) on November 9, 1 967: 'There is great disorder under heaven and the situation is excellent' ( Tianxia da luan, xinghsi da hao ) . The C hinese notion for 'disorder', luan, which can also be translated as 'disturbances: 'upheaval' or 'chaos', is typically rendered as troubles in French. Whence the most common, slightly abridged version used by Badiou: Les troubles sont une excellente chose. This rendering, which I have respected and kept as literal as possible in my own translation, further­ more enables Badiou to play on the opposition between voyer clair, 'to see clearly: and trouble, 'opaque: 'cloudy: 'confused' or 'shady.' A pun on mi-dit, 'half-said' or 'half-stated', and mau-dite, 'ill-said' or

46 47

'cursed'. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (New York: Norton, 1 979), 1 4 5 . Spinoza, Ethics, 2 2 1 (Part Ill, Prop. 59, Scho! . ) .

48 49 50

51 52 53

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55 56

Ibid., 2 1 1 . In French, s 'implace is a neologism on Badiou's part. The reflexive use of the verb could also be translated as 'unplaces itself'. Aeschylus, Eumenides, trans. C hristopher Collard ( O xford: Oxford University Press, 2002 ) , 98- 1 00. Badiou's French translation has 'anxiety' (angoisse) for what is translated as 'trouble' in this English version. Aeschylus, ibid., 1 0 3-1 0 5 . In French, the expression i n this case i s u n sujet de droit, whereas for the most part Badiou talks about law (foi) rather than right (droit) . This is from the last page of 'A Season in Hell', just after the famous line 'Il faut elre absolument moderne', in Arthur Rirrrb aud, Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper & Row, 1 967), 2 1 3 : 'Never mind hymns of thanksgiving: hold on to a step once taken', in French: 'Point de cantiques: tenir le pas gagnt. The original sentence in French, Quoi qu 'il faille revenir-et que ce retour soit sujet-peut sourdre et s 'eciairer le franchissement de ce qui ne comporte plus aucun retour, defies all quick and easy translations. In French, a pun on demission missionaire. See the letter 'Marx to K. Kugelmann in Hanover ( London, April 1 2, 1 87 1 )', SW IT, 420. The French translation of this letter has detruire for 'smash'. Part IV. A Materialist Reversal of Materialism

2

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In French, 'Qu 'est-ce quifait sujet?' once again relies on the malleability of the verb faire. Alternative translations could be 'What constitutes a subject?' or 'What makes for a subject?' A reference to Alain [ E mile-Auguste Chartier], Le Citoyen conlre les pouvoirs ( Paris: Editions du Saggitaire, 1 92 6 ) .

ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

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In French: 11 faut faire le marxisme. 'Found anew' here tran slates refondre, which aside from 'founding' or 'grounding anew' also carries connotations of 'recasting' or 'resourcing oneself'. Further down, 'overhaul' will translate refonte. 'Un-establishment' and ' u n-established' here translate the French desetab­ lissement and desetablie, the opposite of retablir I 'ordre, 'to restore order' or 'to re-establish order'. The allusion is to the French revolutionary Jacques Hebert, who was guil­ lotined on March 24, 1 794, after having become an opponent of Maximilien Robespierre himself for his excessive secularism and worship of Reason. Lacan, Television (Paris: E d itions du Seuil, 1 974), 1 9; Television, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: W. W. Norton, 1 990) , 8. Ibid., 1 6 / 5 (trans. modified ) . In French, the sentence plays on faire na:ud ( 'to operate as a nodal point') and faire centre ( 'becoming a centre ' ) . Na:ud also means 'knot' or 'node'. , Lacan, 'Le sinthome', Ornicar? 7 ( 1 97 7 ) : 12 ( Seminaire du 1 3 janvier 1 976'). 'Absent-mindedly' here tra nslates the F rench avec etourderie, which could be an allusion to Lacan's text L 'etourdit ( 1 97 3 ) , itself a pun on Moliere's play L 'etourdi ( The Blunderer or The Scatterbrain) . The French, etre des lisieres ('a being o f the thresholds' ) , could also b e trans­ lated as 'a being of limits' or a 'border-entity'. See also Badiou, 'The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus' , trans. Laura Balladur and Simon Krysl, Polygraph 1 5- 1 6 (2004): 75-92. See Marx, 'Private Property and Communism', Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vo!. 3, 297. See 'Engels to Conrad Schmidt', in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vo!. 50, 462. Ibid., 466: 'Or are the concepts which prevail in the natural sciences fictions because they by no means always coincide with reality? From the moment we accept the theory of evolution all our concepts of organic life correspond only approximately to reality. Otherwise there would be no change: on the day when concepts and reality completely coincide in the organic world development comes to an end. The concept fish includes a life in water and breathing through gills: how are you gOing to get from fish to amphibian without breaking through this concept? And it has been broken through and we know a whole series of fish which have developed their air bladders further into lungs and can breathe air. How, without bringing one or both concepts into conflict with reality are you going to get from the egg-laying reptile to the mammal, which gives birth to living young? And in reality we have in the monotremata a whole sub-class of egg-laying mammals-in 353

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1 843, I saw the eggs of the duck-bill in Manchester and with arrogant nar­ row-mindedness mocked at such stupidity-as if a mammal could lay eggs­ and now it has been proved! So do not behave to the conceptions of value in the way I had later to beg the duck-bill's pardon for!' (trans. modified) In French: Qui trop au miroir sejie, l 'ornithorynque le dejie. The French here, Je sois(t) perdu, plays on the distance between the first (sois) and the third person (soil), introduced into the subject, not unlike Rimbaud's famous Je est un autre. The French here is slightly more cryptic: La problematisation est trouee du reel pour la verile. Alternative translations include 'Problematization means the breakthrough of the real toward the truth' or 'Problematization is how the real pierces through for the truth'. Friedrich EngeIs, Anti-Diihring, ibid.

Lacan, 'Seminaire R. S. I:, Ornicar? 3 ( 1 97 5 ) : 1 0 5. English translation: 'Seminar of 2 1 January 1 97 5 ', Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the irole freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1 98 3 ) , 1 64. 2 1 Littre indicates that sphinx a t one time was a feminine noun in French, in conformity with Greek, where the sphinx is feminine. This is what seems to be implied in the use of sphinge. 22 In French: D 'ignorer le reste le fait, lui, rester. 2 3 In French: D 'ignorer le miroir le met, lui, en mirroir du monde. 24 The French here, Ce qui est du tout exige la position de l'autre, qui n 'est pas du tout, is quite ambiguous in that n 'est pas du tout can be understood both as 'which is not of the whole' or 'which does not not belong to the whole' and 'which is not at all'. 2 5 The French, en effet de bord sur elle-meme, could also be translated as 'with an effect of being its own border' or 'to the effect of constituting its own border'. 26 Lacan, 'R. S. I., annee 1 974-7 5', Ornicar? 3 ( 1 97 5 ) : 97-8 ( , Seminaire du 1 4 janvier 1 97 5 ' ) . 2 7 In French: Ce dont une coupure historique fait rencontre. This i s one instance where coupure, aside from 'cut' (as in Lacan's topologies) , could also be translated as 'break' (as in a Bachelardian 'epistemological break' ) .

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The French here, ce qui s 'evanouit en reel, could also b e translated a s 'that which vanishes in the real' or 'that which really vanishes' . On August 1 0, 1 966, Mao addresses the crowd in a statement on meeting the masses: 'Concern yourself with affairs of the state', his directive is reported to have been, sometimes translated as 'You should pay attention to state affairs and carry the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution through to the end ! ' See 'Directives Regarding Cultural Revolution', Selected Works, vol. 9.

In the original French, as Badiou confirmed in personal correspondence with the translator, La perte et perdue contains a typo for La perte est perdue. This quote is from the famous circular of 'Sixteen Points' that marked the onset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In English, see 'The Party Decision', The Chinese Cultural Revolution, point 9 (titled 'Cultural Revolutionary Groups, Committees, and Congresses' ) .

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Lacan, 'R. S. I., annee 1 974-7 5', Ornicar? 4 ( 1 97 5 ) 97-8 ( ,Seminaire du 1 1 fevrier 1 97 5 ' ) . Ibid. In French: J 'aime I 'idee du parti polilique, comme on aime ce qui consiste en sujet, d'avoir ete, parce qu 'une fois perdu, le dirigeant a venir de sa resilitation. This heading is a quote from Saint-John Perse's poem Vents (Paris: Flammarion, 1 968), second song. In French: 'Se hater! Se hater! Parole de vivant!' For further information about this famous quotation attributed to Mao, see the Translator's endnote 44 to Part III above. This is most likely a reference to Lenin's 1 920 pamphJet. Left- Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, in vol. 3 1 of his Collected Works: 'The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revo­ lution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the "lower classes" do not want to live in the old way and the "upper classes" cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph' ( 7 1 ) . This quotation ( Tianxia da luan, da dao tianxia da zhi), in which Mao once again relies on the classical Chinese notions of 'all- under-heaven' (tianxia) and 'disorder' (luan) but this time to achieve 'great order under heaven: is most famously found in a letter to his wife Jiang Qing from July 8, 1 966. An English translation of this letter appeared as 'Mao Tse-tung's Private Letter to Chiang Ch'ing: Issues and Studies 9.4 (June 1 97 3 ) : 94-6. Unfortunately, in this translation, the saying in question is glossed over and combined with the following sentence into The situation changes from a great upheaval to a great peace once every seven or eight years' (94) . It is not an existing proverb, as Badiou suggests, so much as an original creation based on an ancient expression which Mao's flair for quotable one-liners, not unlike Badiou's own taste for such gnomiC formulations, turned into a popular quasi-aphoristic sentence. 355

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ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES

In French, the expression non-lieu has the j uridical sense of 'no ground for trial'. In the present context, aside from evoking the topology of place and outplace, not to mention the etymology of the Greek utopia as 'nonplace', the term could also be translated as 'nonevent'. In French, 'la ' femme evokes a quasi-archetypal understanding of Woma n or universal womanhood, which is precisely what is put under erasure or barred in Lacan's formulas of sexuation: 'la ' femme, en effet, inexiste au tout. Despite the awkwardness of the translation, I have rendered this in English as ' ''the'' woman'. In the next sentence, a paraphrase of Hegel's famous reading of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit, I use 'Woman' with a large capital to translate la femme. See Thomas Jech, Set Theory (New York: Academic Press, 1 978), 3 3 1 . PauI J. Cohen, Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (New York-Amsterdam: W. A. Benjamin, 1 966), 1 1 2 . Ibid. Ibid., 1 5 1 (I have modified the English in accordance with the changes that Badiou introduced in his French translation-all changes meant to make the text more accessible ) . I n these final lines, Badiou i s quoting from Mallarme's ' U n coup de des': 'dans ces parages / du vague / en quoi toute rea lite se dissout' all the way to the image of the lanceur or 'dice thrower'. Part VI. Topics of Ethics

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7

356

Julien Gracq, Lettrines (Paris: Jose Corti, 1 967), 67-70. See Mao, 'Talk at the First Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (April 28, 1 9 6 9 ) " Selected Works, vol. 9, available online at http : //www.marxists.org. Mao as reported in 'The Great Cultural Revolution Will Shine For Ever', Peking Review 19 (May 2 1 , 1 97 6 ) : 6- 1 0. In French, the neologism de-sens, which evokes 'un-sense' or 'dis-sense', is homonymous with decence, 'decency'. Another, more cumbersome, transla­ tion to keep the neologism could be 'dis-sense -y'. In French, in-de-sens, a homonym for indecence, 'indecency', further extends the neologistic pun on that which runs counter to common sense and decency. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, E. Hudson Long, revised by Donald Pizer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1 976), 1 09. On the fused group and the pledged group, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique ofDialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, foreword Fredric Jameson (New York-London: Verso, 2004), 343-404 and 43 3-9.

8 9 lO

11

Ecclesiastes 1 :7. See Blaise Pascal, Pensees, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 2 7 3 ( S749/L9 1 9 ) . In the French original, the last lines o f this sentence are missing. I n personal correspondence with the translator, Badiou proposes to make up for this gap as follows: et non cause illusoire de leur determination. L 'imaginaire vient ainsi consolider le reel et non installer le semblant. This is from the last stanza of Mallarme's 'Toast funebre' ( ,Funereal Toast'). In French, the lines read: C'est de nos vrais bouquets deja tout le sejour Ou le poere pur a pour geste humble et large De l'interdire au reve, ennemi de sa charge.

12

13

14 15 16

17 18

A. Y. Vyshinsky, Procurator of the USSRIState Prosecutor, in Report of the Court Proceedings in the Case ofthe Anti-Soviet 'Bloc ofRights and Trotskyites ' heard before the Military Collegium ofthe Supreme Court ofthe USSR ( Moscow: People's Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, 1 93 8 ) , 697. Subsequent page numbers in the body of the text refer to this same edition. The French here, parti, has both a strictly political meaning ('party') and a more general sense ( 'decision', 'stance', 'position', 'standpoint ' ) . The sen­ tence thus talks about the risk of taking the wrong decision as much as of choosing the wrong party. Stalin, Leninism, 1 7 1 . See 'The Party Decision', in The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1 76-7. See Wang Hongwen, 'Report o n the Revision o f the Party Constitution (Delivered at the Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China on August 24 and Adopted on August 28, 1 97 3 ', The Tenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Documents) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1 97 3 ) , 48. See Fran<;ois Duc d e L a Rochefoucauld, Maxims, trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin, 1 9 5 9 ) , 23 (maxim 2 6 ) . 'One has reason to revolt against the reactionaries' or 'It is justified to rebel against the reactionaries' is a phrase coined in a speech by Mao, made in 1 939 to celebrate Stalin's 60th birthday: 'There are innumerable principles of Marxism, but in the last analysis they can all be summed up in one sentence: "To rebel is justified." For thousands of years everyone said: " Oppression is justified, exploitation is justified, rebellion is not justified." From the time when Marxism appeared on the scene, this old judgment was turned upside down, and this is a great contribution', in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought ofMao Tse-Tung (New York: Praeger, 1 969), 427-8. For a detailed analysis of the different meanings of this phrase, see Chapter 1 from Badiou's Theorie de la contradiction (Paris: Fran<;ois Maspero, 1 97 5 ) , 357

THEORY OF THE SUBJ ECT

translated as 'An Essential Philosophical Thesis: "It is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries''', trans. Alberto Toscano, positions: east asia cultures critique 1 3 (200 5 ) : 669-77. 1 9 See Forty-One Red Hearts are with Chairman Mao Forever (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1 967), 1 8- 1 9 . 2 0 Samuel Beckett, How i t Is (New York: Grove Press, 1 988), 1 24. 2 1 See On the Question of Agricultural Co-operation (July 3 1 , 1 9 5 5 ) , in Quotations from Mao Tse Tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1 972), 3 (trans. modi­ fied to render Badiou's insistence on 'confidence ' ) . 22 This quote i s from the end o f Rimbaud's ' A Season i n Hell', Complete Works, 2 1 3 (trans. modified ) .

Thematic Repertoi re

This repertoire is obviously incomplete and, furthermore, it contains several bizarre entries. It deals only laterally with what is essential. Thus, the word 'Maoism' is not pronounced in it and the concepts of the subject are almost absent from it. It arranges for a few service entrances. 1. ART AND LITERATURE

Art and the crowd: 6 5-8. Poetry as the annulment of exchange: 7 3 . Explanation o f the sonnet 'A l a nue accablante tu': 74-8 3 . Style as philosophical requirement: 7 5 . Theatre, o f superior essence: 84-7; operator o f Sophocleism: 1 6 1-2. Brief explanation of A Dice Throw . . : 92-4. The forced function of perorations: 95-7. Explanation of the sonnet 'Ses purs ongles tres haul' ('Her nails on high . . ' ) : 1 00- 1 0. Poetry as topology of language: 1 5 9, 3 0 3 . Explanation o f the ending o f Aeschylus' Eumenides: 1 64-5. Ethical meaning of the novel of formation: 3 3 3 . The second act o f Wagner's Tristan: 3 1 8, 3 3 3 . .

.

See also: S . Beckett, J. Conrad, S. Crane, J. Gracq, L a Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Rimbaud, Sophocles, Aeschylus.

359

THEMATIC REPERTOIRE

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

Il. HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES

a. The Effective Universals June 1 848: 1 72, 204, 283; anxiety: 292. The Paris Commune: xl. 20; inexhaustible analyser: xli; its double assessment: 45-6; the people and destruction: 1 72-3; wedging of a double mode of being: 2 30- 1 ; anticipation and retroaction: 2 5 1 . October 1 9 1 7: 20; as assessment of the Commune: 47-9; the insurrection as violation of politics: 1 70; as periodization of Marxism: 204. The Cultural Revolution: I t 42; identity of position with the Commune: 47; Mallarmean artistic function: 67; as signifier of exception: 88; first commu­ nist revolution: 1 85; forcing the empty place of Leninism: 205; repeating the Commune so as to make it into the real: 2 3 1 ; its dogmatic diagonal: 3 1 4- 1 5; and ethics: 3 1 5- 1 6; and the superego: 3 2 5-6. h. National Data

The Revolution of 1 789-93: 38; nature of its materialism: 1 8 5; the Terror: 29 3-4. World War 1: xl. World War II: xl. Resistance: xl. Colonial wars: xl. 260. May-June 1 968: xl. 1 1 , 292; objective and subjective: 4 1 -2; the great sixties: 302; movement, or subject ( 7 ) : 322.

c. Scattered References Peasant wars in Germany: 298. The Third International: 20, 1 2 6; as domain of the possible: 204; masculine: 262. The Portuguese Revolution of 1 974-5: 7 1 .

Ill. God Aporias of the Creation: 4-5. Theory of Incarnation: 1 5- 1 6. Logic of heresies: 1 6- 1 7 . Theatre's essential catholicity: 84-5. Saint Paul and the second foundation of Christianity: 1 2 5 . The stakes for the first materialism: 1 86. The Christian Two: 1 90- 1 . I n the imaginary diagonal courage-superego: 298. Islamic: 300. That He inexists in the world and exceeds the Text: 30 1 . See also: Malebranche, Pascal. Saint Paul

IV. LOGIC AND MATHEMATICS a. Modus Operandi: the transmission of mathematics: 3 9-40; of their dialectical usage: 1 48-9; science of the real: 1 54; in the razorblade of the Marxist barber: 2 1 0; quick glance at the golden ages: 2 1 6 . b . Logic and Set Theory: extraordinary sets a n d the axiom o f regularity ( o r of foundation ) : 90- 1 ; Cantor's theorem: 2 1 5- 1 7; quantifiers: 272; arithmetics of cardinals: 266-7; the continuum hypothesis: 266; consistency of the con­ tinuum hypothesis with constructible sets: 267-70; Rowbottom's theorem, large cardinals: 269-7 1 . c. Algebra and Number Theory: 2 1 9-20; torsion groups: 149-54; the extension of the countable or denumerable: 202-5; definition of algebra: 2 1 0; definition of belonging: 2 1 1 ; axioms of Peano: 226. d. Topology: 2 1 9-20; Miibius strip: 35; global and local: 1 20- 1 ; definition of topology: 2 1 0-1 1 ; commentary on the axioms of neighbourhoods: 22 1-3; Borromean knot: 226-8.

V. TRADITIONAL PHILOSOPHY

d. Others Council of Nicea: 1 5 . Renaissance: 3 8 .

360

Ancient atomism: 5 3-6 1 . Classification of philosophies: 1 1 6-2 1 . History of materialisms: 1 87-9. Structural trajectory of idealisms: 1 90-2. An old theme: 2 34-6 . Classical theories of the subject: 278-80. 361

THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

THEMATIC REPERTO I R E

Ethical discourses: 32 1-9.

Communism: 78, 96; as annulment of the State: 88-92; fallacious halting point: 1 08; definition: 1 34; justice: 1 5 9; concrete: 1 84; and the dictatorship of the proletariat: 1 88; revolution: 205-6; topological: 2 3 5; the revolution is its abstract moment: 244; one of the four concepts: 282-4; utopian: 298; is not legislatable except diagonally: 300.

See also: Aristotle, Descartes, Heidegger, Plato, Kant

VI. PSYCHOANALYSIS STRICTO SENSU American psychoanalysis: 30, 1 44, 1 98. E cole freudienne de Paris: 40- 1 . The transmission o f psychoanalysis: 40. Its shipwreck for the benefit of ethics: 1 36 . The psychoanalytical cure and political re-education: 1 42-4. In an inconsistent totality with Marxism: 280. Does not argue from a case of healing: 30 I See also: Freud

c. Mass and Class Masses, mass movement: clinamen: 58-9; vanishing term of history: 6 3-4; it is right to rebel: 1 06, 2 34; name of the real: 1 3 6; is not implied but forced: 273; confidence in the masses: 330. Working class: procedure of its scission: 9; it makes a nodal point of the two definitions of capitalism: 26; as social class and as political class: 1 88; its three levels of consistency: 2 3 6-8; spontaneous fatalism: 328. Proletariat: torsion: 1 2 9-30; what a revolution presents to another revolution: 1 34; name of the truth as not-all: 1 73 ; makes the working class disappear: 2 38; where is it?: 280-4; political existence, ethical existence: 3 30- 1 .

VII. POLITICAL THEORY

a. Politics and History

d. The New Bourgeoisie

History: it does not exist: 92; who are its actors?: 1 80- 1 ; the four fundamental contradictions of the contemporary world: 2 1 7. Politics: as structure of fiction: 85-6; in retreat: 85-6; lamp-bearing: 1 08; itera­ tive and break-up of the One: 1 1 4-1 5; in internal exclusion to its obj ect: 1 30; its ef-fact of not being: 1 34; opposed to trade unionism: 1 4 1 ; equivocity of the concept of relation of force: 1 70; from the One to the One One: 2 1 3-14; without proper name: 2 1 9; the point of view of class on the State in the masses: 229; the inexistent proper to the State: 262; line and organization: 286; and ethics: 309- 1 6; to fail and to give in: 322.

Modern revisionism, PCF: determines the class: 9; two bourgeoisies, two revo­ lutions: 82-3; superficial critique of 1 968: 1 96-7; statist knot of the party: 229-30; USSR: 74, 83; it exists: 83; demonstrating the contradiction Leninist party/communism: 206; its novelty: 246; Sino-Soviet split: 2 2 5 . Gulag, totalitarianism: totalitarianism does not exist: 1 2; falseness o f the thesis 'A camp is a camp': 1 42; the politics of Terror: 29 3-4; Moscow trials: 3 1 2- 1 5 . Socialism: it does not exist: 7-8; immobile mover: 2 3 5 . The State: reversal o f the statist lack: 82; and revolt: 1 06; i t never proves the existence of the proletariat: 1 34; superego: 1 46, 1 5 9; and the indivision of the law: 1 84; object of Leninism: 20 5-6; in a Borromean knot with the masses and the classes: 228-30; never a guarantee of communism: 2 3 5 .

h. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Marxism

Class struggle, contradiction bourgeoisie/proletariat: structure: 7; struggle � con­ tradiction: 24; schema: 43; seen by Mallarme: 98-100; the relation of class as impossible: 1 2 6-7; class point of view and truth: 1 7 3; one of the four concepts: 282-4. Revolution: false time to conclude: 96; proper name of the impossible of Marxism: 1 2 8; other of the Other: 1 5 6; anxiety and courage: 1 72; � communism: 20 5-6; algebraic: 229; the class seizes the mass: 246; interruption: 2 5 6-7. Dictatorship of the proletariat: reciprocatable with communism: 1 88; one of the four concepts: 282-4. 362

e . Conjuncture Imperialist society: 7, 1 4 1 , 262-3. Multinational people: xl; the immigrant proletarian as empty place (equality of rights) and excess (international proletariat of France ) : 262-4. Trade unionism, unionist worldview: 9, 2 6-7; abstract element of the subjective: 2 37; makes consistency out of the capitalist cause: 2 38; and the nation-State: 266-70. 363

THEORY OF THE S U BdECT

Youth: active nihilism: 329. The intellectuals: xl; greater during the Stalin era: 302; and the ethical debate aher 1 976: 3 2 1 -2 .

Index of Proper Names

f The Subject, the Party One does not love one another in them: 40; Leninism for the university: 46; relation to the masses: 9 1 ; subjective point of politics: 1 1 5; as communist: 1 82-3; as schematism: 1 9 1 -2; asymptotic: 1 98; in the contradiction revolu­ tion/communism: 205; as One One: 2 1 3; tying together the knot: 229; third level of consistency: 2 3 7-8; supports the four discourses in the Lacanian sense: 246-7; body of politics: 290; ethical meaning of the partisan mindset: 3 1 2- 1 6; confidence in the party: 3 3 0- l . I recall that absent from the enumeration below are: Engels, Hegel,

H6lderlin, Lacan, Lenin, Mallarme, Mao Zedong, Marx. When it is a question of a simple mention by way of illustration, the page number is italicized . Aeschylus 84, 1 56, 1 58, 1 6 1-3, 1 66-8, 3 1 9 Alain 1 8 1 Althusser, L . 23, 1 87, 2 24

Aristotle 49, 122, 1 9 1 , 2 3 5 Aron, R. 302 Beckett, S . 280, 3 30 Berkeley, G. 1 1 7-1 8

Bernstein, E . 208 Beuve-Mery, H. 292

Comte, A. xxxvii, 49 Conrad, J. 1 59 Crane, S. 2 9 5 De Saci, 1. 3 0 1 Debord, G. 329 Deleuze, G. 22, 207, 287 Democritus 59-60, 69 Descartes, R. 40, 1 87, 3 0 1 Devlin, K . J . 267-8 Duras, M. 1 3 1

Brecht, B . 84

Brezhnev, L. 1. 9 7 Bukharin, N. 3 1 2- 1 4 Camus, A. 3 02 Cantor, G. 2 1 6, 2 1 7, 2 6 1 , 266 Chateaubriand, F.-R. 280 Cohen, P.-J. 2 7 1 -4 364

Epictetus 30 1 Epicurus 3 1 9 Eudoxus 203, 205 Euripides 1 65-6 Fermat, P. 40 Flaubert, G. 3 1 0 Foucault, M . 1 87, 1 88 365

I N DEX O F PROPER NAMES

THEORY OF THE S U BJECT

Fourier, Ch. 298 Freud, A. 209

Malebranche, N. 37 Marchais, G. 97

180, 1 93, 205, 209, 22 5-6, 232,

Freud, S . 1 1 5, 1 24, 1 2 5-8, 1 32,

Mersenne, M. 40

294-6, 302, 3 12, 3 1 5, 3 2 5

1 35, 1 61 , 1 66, 1 74, 1 97, 225, 279-80, 284 Galois, E. 2 1 6 Gauss, C . F . 2 1 6 Gide, A . 3 1 0

Miller, J.-A. 1 32-5 Milner, J . - C . 262-3 Mitterrand, F. 45, 329, 3 5 1 Moliet, G . 302 Montaigne 3 0 1 Miintzer, T . 298

Stalin, J. xl, 20, 38, 8 1 , 9 1 , 1 1 7,

Thiers, A . 3 1 0

Voltaire 1 86 Vyshinsky, A. I. 3 1 2- 1 4 Wagner, R. 65, 89, 1 07, 236, 3 1 8, 333 Wang Hongwen 3 1 5- 1 6

Viele-Griffin, F . 97 Villiers de l'Isle Adam, A. 3 1 0

Zola, E . 98

Glucksmann, A . 1 82 G6deL K. 267, 268-9, 270-1 , 2 73, 286 Goethe, J. W. von 3 5 Gracq, J. xli, 280

Newton, I. 186 PascaL B. 40-1, 280, 30 1 Petain, Ph. xL 3 1 0

The explicit nominations are unfair. Here I must speak of Gardner Davies, luminous analyst of Maliarme, and of Fran<;ois Regnault, who teaches me the theatre.

Plato 1 84, 1 9 1 , 1 93, 3 1 8 Hebert, J. 1 86

Pol Pot 1 8 1 Politzer, G . 1 79 Pompidou, G. 42

Heidegger, M. 7, 69, 2 3 4-5 Hilbert, D. 2 1 6 Hugo, V . 95

Pythagoras 202-5

Jech, T. 3 6 5

Reich, W. 208

Jones, E . 209 Jung, C. G. 208

Rimbaud, A. 1 1 6, 1 68, 2 1 6, 3 1 0, 332 Robespierre, M. 292, 296

Kant, I. 95, 1 1 7- 1 9, 186, 1 9 1 , 1 94, 2 0 1 , 278, 287

Rowbottom, F . 269-70

Kautsky, K. 1 9 1 Khrushchev, N . 1 80, 208

Saint Luke 23 Saint Paul 1 2 5, 1 9 1

La Mettrie, J. 1 2 1

Saint Thomas 122

La Rochefoucauld, F. 319

Saint-John Perse 254 Sandevince, P. xxxix, xliv

Lassalie, F . 209 Leibniz, G. W. 24, 69 Levi-Strauss, c . 207 Lin Biao 1 7, 1 80 Liu Shaoqi 1 7, 3 1 4, 325 Louis XI 296 Lucretius 12 I

Sartre, J.-P. 272, 278, 299, 300, 302 Schelling, F. W. J. 3 1 8 Seguy, G. 42

Rousseau, J . -J. 4 1

Saint Peter 125

366

Shafarevitch, I. 1 54 Sophocles 1 5 5-6, 1 58, 1 6 1 -6, 1 68, 309, 3 1 5 Spinoza, B . 22, 37, 1 60 367